Homer Just Beat Deadpool: The Odyssey Is Now the Biggest Adult Movie Ever

Turns out a nearly 3,000-year-old Greek poem can still do serious numbers.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has officially become the highest-grossing Adult movie of all time, sailing past Deadpool & Wolverine with a staggering $1.352 billion at the worldwide box office. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s Marvel blockbuster had held the record since 2024 with $1.338 billion.

Not bad for a film about a bloke taking an extremely complicated route home.

Released on 17 July, The Odyssey arrived with the sort of expectations normally reserved for superheroes, Jedi and blue people. Instead, Nolan gave audiences Homer, Greek mythology, swords, sandals and almost three hours of cinematic ambition.

And audiences absolutely went for it.

The film has now earned around $516 million in North America and more than $835 million internationally. Even more remarkably, it is still playing in cinemas, so Odysseus may have a few more box-office monsters to defeat before he finally reaches Ithaca.

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of the story is what The Odyssey has done for the biggest screen in the building.

Nolan shot the movie entirely using IMAX film cameras — a first for a feature film — and audiences have clearly decided that if you're going to watch a gigantic wooden horse, raging seas and ancient warriors beating seven bells out of each other, you might as well see them properly. IMAX said the film had already generated $346.4 million worldwide in the format by 17 August, extending its lead as the biggest IMAX release ever.

That means Avatar, for years the king of premium-format cinema, has finally lost its IMAX crown.

There’s another rather impressive name further down the list: Christopher Nolan.

The Odyssey is now the director’s biggest film ever at the box office, overtaking The Dark Knight Rises, which finished with around $1.08 billion worldwide. Nolan has somehow reached the point where convincing millions of people to watch a three-hour adaptation of Homer feels less like a gamble and more like a perfectly sensible business plan.

Ryan Reynolds, whose Deadpool & Wolverine previously held the Adult record, took the defeat rather well.

“Congratulations to the entire cast and crew of The Odyssey for becoming the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time,” Reynolds wrote on X.

And what a cast it is.

Matt Damon leads the voyage as Odysseus, King of Ithaca, alongside Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal and John Leguizamo.

But the biggest star may ultimately be Nolan himself.

Studios have spent years worrying about whether audiences can still be persuaded away from streaming and back into cinemas. Nolan's answer appears to be remarkably straightforward: give them something that actually feels worth leaving the house for.

Oppenheimer turned a three-hour historical drama about nuclear physics into a global phenomenon. Now The Odyssey has transformed Homer into a billion-dollar blockbuster and broken the all-time Adult box-office record along the way.

No multiverse. No capes. No cinematic universe homework.

Just one filmmaker, one enormous screen and possibly the longest journey home in cinema history.

At $1.352 billion and counting, it turns out Odysseus didn't just conquer Troy.

He conquered Deadpool too.