After a successful opening weekend at the box office, Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, The Odyssey, is officially here. To even call its opening weekend box office performance “successful” might be underselling it, considering The Odyssey now holds the record for the biggest live-action box office opening of 2026, and the biggest global opening of Christopher Nolan’s career. Widely praised by critics and audiences as one of the most immersive historical epics ever made, The Odyssey is in line to become Nolan’s second movie ever to hit $1 billion at the box office — the first was The Dark Knight Rises, the Batman film starring Christian Bale and Tom Hardy. The Odyssey is based on the famous novel of the same name written by Homer, but there are many chapters in the story that connect with some of the same characters.
While comparison is the thief of joy, it’s only natural to compare movies that share characters and stories, and the most natural comparison to The Odyssey, at least for most fans, has been Troy. Brad Pitt stars opposite Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom in the 2004 historical epic, which grossed $497 million at the box office against a $175 million budget. All these years after Troy’s theatrical run, the film is currently only streaming on AMC+, and while it is charting in the top 10 on the platform, it’s also having a run of success on VOD. There is such a demand to watch Troy after seeing The Odyssey in theaters that the film has become one of the top 10 most-watched titles in more than 25 countries on both Apple TV and Prime Video.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Did Critics Like ‘Troy’?
Troy earned scores of 53% from critics and 74% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, both scores that are well below the 95% from critics and 97% from audiences held by The Odyssey on the aggregator site. The critics’ consensus for Troy was that, while the film certainly boasts spectacle and entertaining action sequences, it lacks the emotional heart at the core of other all-time great epics. Many of these same critics of Troy have shared their love for the emotional story at the center of The Odyssey, along with the mountain of great performances delivered by Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, John Leguizamo, and more.
Check out Troy on AMC+ or on VOD platforms like Prime Video, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of The Odyssey.
