Christopher Nolan doesn’t need a superhero suit, a lightsaber, or a shared universe to sell out movie tickets. Instead, he appears to have enough brand equity to make a nearly three-hour, R-rated adaptation of Homer open bigger than any Batman movie he ever made.
The Odyssey—Nolan’s take on the classic Greek epic about a mythological hero’s boat ride home—raked in $264 million in its opening weekend, clearing its $250 million production budget and topping The Dark Knight Rises, The Dark Knight, and Oppenheimer to become the director’s biggest global debut.
This is a notable feat for an ancient war epic with no franchise scaffolding or superhero to lean on, making Nolan the closest thing Hollywood has to a “non-IP IP”—a filmmaker whose name functions like a franchise, according to Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at Comscore and one of the film industry’s most recognizable experts.
“It’s an automatic must-see cinematic event when Christopher Nolan’s name is on the movie,” Dergarabedian told Fortune.
He likens the director’s credit to the old Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, a mark that creates “a mandate among moviegoers” to show up even when they don’t know what the film is about. In Comscore’s audience surveys, he noted, viewers rarely cite the director as their reason for buying a ticket, but Nolan is one of the few exceptions.
