How Much Money Does a Movie Have to Make Before It Stops Being a Flop?
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been in theaters for eleven days, and in that time the amount of money it needs to earn in order to count as a success has gone up four separate times.
You can watch the whole thing happen in your feed if you scroll back far enough. It’ll flop. Okay, it won’t earn its budget back. Okay, it needs $750 million to break even. Actually it needs $850 million. Let’s see where it is after one week. Let’s see where it is after two weeks. Let’s see where it is after three weeks. IT NEEDS 1.36 BILLION TO BREAK EVEN.
Those are all real, and the last one went up on X a few days ago with no accounting behind it and no source anybody can point to. Someone else on the platform put the escalation together into a single thread and the joke wrote itself, because the next rung on that ladder is twenty trillion dollars and a demand that Nolan personally apologize to Homer.
Here’s the part nobody arguing about the break-even number wants to sit with. Universal spent $250 million producing The Odyssey and another $125 million marketing it, which is $375 million all in, and the industry rule of thumb puts break-even somewhere between two and two and a half times the production budget once the theaters take their cut. Call it $500 to $625 million. As of this weekend the film has grossed $652 million worldwide, and it has not opened yet in China, Japan or Korea.
So the movie is already profitable, the goalposts are still moving, and the people moving them have started arguing with each other about whether the movie they lost to even counts.
The receipts, since we’re doing receipts
The opening was the biggest of Nolan’s career, $264.1 million globally, ahead of The Dark Knight Rises and well ahead of Oppenheimer. That’s an R-rated, nearly three-hour movie about a Bronze Age sailing trip, opening against a market that everyone agrees is smaller than it used to be.
The second weekend is the number that should have ended the conversation. The Odyssey pulled $87 million domestic, a drop of only 27 percent, which Variety noted was the second-biggest sophomore weekend an R-rated film has ever posted behind Deadpool & Wolverine. Most tentpoles opening above $100 million fall by half or worse in week two. This one barely flinched, and in IMAX it’s been the second-fastest film in history to $100 million behind Avengers: Endgame, with the 70mm shows sold out into September. It is also now the highest-grossing R-rated movie of the year.
When the numbers wouldn’t cooperate, the argument moved to the numbers themselves being fake. Some people decided the budget was actually $800 to $900 million, which would conveniently push break-even past $1.5 billion and is not remotely true. Others floated the theory that Universal is buying up its own tickets to fill seats, a conspiracy that gets recycled for every movie this crowd decides to hate and has never once come with evidence beyond a photo of an empty matinee. And then there was the great Rotten Tomatoes discovery, which is worth walking through slowly, because the math is the whole joke.
A user on the Asmongold subreddit parsed the JSON behind the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page and found that out of 886 accounts, 498 had rated it positively, which works out to 56.2 percent. That got posted as the film’s real audience score, the displayed 97 percent got declared “mathematically impossible,” and it ricocheted around the platform for the better part of a week as proof of industry-wide fraud. The arithmetic is fine. The problem is that those 886 accounts are the unverified pool, meaning people who left a rating with no evidence of having bought a ticket, which is the exact pool that review bombing lives in and the entire reason RT built the verified system back in 2019. What these guys discovered, after all that parsing, is that a campaign to tank a movie’s score had successfully tanked the one score a campaign is able to tank. Josh Billinson said it best when he noted that throwing out the reviews from people who actually saw the movie does tend to move the number.
It wasn’t hidden either. RT surfaces the verified score by default, third-party sites track both numbers, and the sanity checks all sit outside Rotten Tomatoes entirely. Letterboxd verifies nothing at all and has The Odyssey at 4.4 out of 5. IMDb has no ticket-linking either and has it at 8.4 out of 10, with roughly a tenth of its ratings coming in at a flat 1, which is what a bombing campaign looks like when you graph it.
There is exactly one real thing buried in all of this, and it’s that Fandango owns Rotten Tomatoes and NBCUniversal owns Fandango, which does put the site inside the same corporate family as the movie’s distributor. Fair enough, worth knowing. It also doesn’t come with a single deleted review or leaked directive to back the suppression claim, and it doesn’t explain Letterboxd or IMDb, who are not owned by anybody in this story. And the same viral post that produced the 56.2 percent went on to allege that Universal was buying tickets and cancelling the orders at the last second, so you can calibrate the rigor accordingly.
I want to be fair about what started all this, because the people involved have been very clear that it wasn’t about the boats. Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Elliot Page was cast as Sinon, and Elon Musk accused Nolan of desecrating the poem to satisfy the Academy’s diversity criteria.
That last bit is the load-bearing claim in this whole business, and it falls apart the second anybody reads the actual rules. The Academy’s Representation and Inclusion Standards apply to exactly one category, Best Picture, and every other Oscar runs on the same eligibility requirements it always did. A film has to meet two of four standards to qualify. Only one of those four has anything to do with who is on screen. The others cover the crew and department heads, and then whether the distributor runs paid apprenticeships and training programs and whether there are women and people of color in its marketing and distribution leadership. Those last two ask nothing about the film itself, only about what the company releasing it does as a corporation, which means Universal was most of the way to qualifying before Nolan finished the script. He could have cast the entire thing with blond Englishmen and The Odyssey would still have been eligible for Best Picture. When the Academy walked its own members through the rules, it noted that every Best Picture nominee from the prior year would have met them.
Matt Walsh weighed in on whether Nyong’o qualifies as the most beautiful woman in the world, which is a thing a grown man typed with his hands. Nyong’o’s response to all of it, given to Elle months before release, was that she wasn’t going to spend her time building a defense, since the criticism would exist whether she engaged with it or not. She also pointed out that Helen hatched from an egg, which does complicate the historical accuracy angle somewhat.
The inflation dodge
Once the raw gross became indefensible, the fallback was that these numbers don’t mean anything unless you adjust for inflation, and that The Odyssey is nowhere near the real top of the charts once you do.
Adjusting for inflation does not transport an old movie into today’s marketplace. It takes tickets sold under yesterday’s population, wages, competition, release patterns and moviegoing habits, then slaps today’s price on them and calls it a comparison. Inflation didn’t happen to ticket prices in a vacuum. If you want to compare eras honestly you have to adjust the entire market, not the single number that produces the answer you were hoping for.
You don’t have to take my word for this. Box Office Mojo, which publishes the adjusted chart everybody links, says so in its own help documentation. The site notes that adjusting for ticket price inflation isn’t an exact science and can’t account for changes in population, the number of movies in the marketplace at a given time, broader economic conditions, or competition from television and home entertainment and streaming. Their chart is also domestic-only, and the base year is a dropdown menu. Switch it from 2019 dollars to some other year and the whole ranking shifts under you.
There is no universally accepted inflation-adjusted worldwide box office chart, and the reason is boring and technical. Doing it properly requires country-by-country ticket price inflation, currency conversion, exchange rate movement over decades, income fluctuation, and a separate methodology for re-releases, which most of the old titles on those lists have had several of. The major databases don’t publish one because it can’t be done cleanly. What circulates online instead is homemade, and the homemade versions admit it right there in the header, with disclaimers that the values could be higher or lower because the calculation for old movies is very difficult. That’s the source people are waving around like it’s a Treasury report.
Everybody is playing on a smaller field now
The bigger problem with era comparisons is that the pandemic broke the thing being compared, and it never healed.
In 2019, the last normal year, the domestic box office did $11.3 billion. In 2024 it did $8.7 billion, down 23.5 percent, and admissions fell from roughly 1.3 billion tickets to around 800 million. In 2025 it was 780 million admissions and $8.87 billion, with the average ticket up to $13.29. Before the pandemic the industry sold well over a billion tickets a year, every year, from 2005 to 2019. Revenue is being propped up by pricing, which is why the honest metric is uglier: ticket sales are down close to 40 percent from 2019.
The shape of a theatrical run changed too. Week-over-week declines after opening used to run 15 to 20 percent in the early 2000s and now run 50 percent or worse, and the share of Americans who describe themselves as infrequent moviegoers went from 30 percent to 53 percent. PwC’s forecast doesn’t have global box office returning to pre-COVID levels until 2030 at the earliest. The exhibition side nearly didn’t survive at all, with AMC weeks from bankruptcy and Regal’s parent company filing Chapter 11 with about $5 billion in debt.
None of which happened because of casting. It happened because the industry spent five years teaching people to wait.
Before 2020, a movie played in theaters for roughly 90 days before it could legally show up anywhere else. Then Universal cut a deal with AMC in July of that year that collapsed the exclusive window to 17 days, Warner Bros. put its whole 2021 slate on HBO Max the same day those films hit theaters, and by 2022 the 45-day window was the new industry standard. Nolan, as it happens, walked away from Warner Bros. over that decision and took Oppenheimer to Universal. A guest column in Deadline this February said the quiet part about as plainly as anyone inside the business is willing to, which is that short windows train audiences to wait for the film to show up at home.
It worked. An AP-NORC poll last September found that about three-quarters of American adults had streamed a new movie instead of seeing it in a theater at least once in the past year, while only 16 percent were still going to a theater monthly. Convenience and cost were the reasons people gave. One woman AP talked to, a 69-year-old in New Jersey, laid out the entire economics of the situation in about two sentences: it’s more convenient, and she only has to wait a month or two, because movies get to streaming pretty quickly now. That’s the whole thing. She’s got a flatscreen, a pause button for when she needs to pee, snacks she didn’t have to take out a loan for, and nobody’s toddler howling two rows back or lighting up a phone in the third act.
Which is where the go-woke-go-broke theory eats itself, because if audiences were abandoning these movies on ideological grounds, the movies would be dying at home too. They are doing the exact opposite. Wicked, the Cynthia Erivo picture that spent a solid year absorbing every flavor of abuse the internet has on offer, went to digital after a 40-day window and pulled $70 million in its first week, which was the biggest opening day and opening week of home entertainment sales in Universal’s entire history, beating The Super Mario Bros. Movie by $26 million. It closed out with $100 million in PVOD. Then it landed on Peacock and did 882 million minutes in seven days, the most-watched film premiere in that service’s history. The last Universal title to sit on top of the Nielsen streaming chart like that was Oppenheimer.
The audience never went anywhere. It moved to the couch, because the studios built a fast lane straight to the couch and then acted surprised about where everybody went. Universal quietly started extending its windows again this past March, which tells you the people who actually do this for a living have identified the problem, and it isn’t Lupita Nyong’o.
Which is the context for that 27 percent second-weekend hold, and it’s why The Odyssey clearing $652 million in eleven days is a more impressive number than a billion-dollar run in 2015 was. A $250 million movie in 2026 is being asked to clear a bar that was set in a market that no longer exists, by people who then turn around and measure it against 1977.
Nobody has ever agreed on what the word means
Here’s the thing that makes all of this possible. “Woke” doesn’t have a definition, and the people who built careers on it have known that for years.
Bethany Mandel co-wrote a book about woke indoctrination that includes an entire chapter defining the term, went on The Hill’s Rising to promote it, and froze for half a minute when the host asked her what the word meant. She predicted, correctly and out loud while it was happening, that the moment would go viral. She eventually landed on it being very hard to define and apologized for not managing it in a soundbite.
Ron DeSantis built an entire governorship on the word and has mostly declined to define it. When his general counsel had to produce a definition under oath in a Tallahassee federal courtroom, what he came up with was the belief that systemic injustices exist in American society and that they need to be addressed, which is a sentence most Americans would sign without blinking. And in fact they do, since polling has found a solid majority read the term positively, as meaning aware and informed about social injustice.
A word that means nothing can be applied to anything. More usefully, it can be taken back off anything, which is what happens the moment the target starts making money.
Barbie is the template. Ben Shapiro burned the dolls on camera and called it one of the most woke movies he’d ever seen. The film crossed a billion dollars in three weeks and finished at $1.4 billion, and the label quietly came off. An anti-woke Substack published a piece arguing Barbie was the least woke movie of the year because it upholds the gender binary, and that Shapiro and Walsh had no idea what they were even fighting. A conservative outlet ran a full reading of it as a conservative critique of society and an ingenious trick by Greta Gerwig. The movie did not change between July and August of 2023. The gross did.
Now watch it happen live. Shapiro went and saw The Odyssey in IMAX and conceded it was really good, then called it a masterpiece while still objecting to the Elliot Page casting. Lara Trump went further and said the critics were missing the Biblical forest for the woke trees, and that the film was a large-scale win for civilizational values. Musk, meanwhile, responded “True” to a post claiming the movie advances a plan to destroy Western Civilization, and Megyn Kelly accused Hollywood of hating white people. Matt Walsh had to publish a post that opens by instructing conservatives not to listen to any other conservative claiming The Odyssey isn’t woke.
He is now policing his own side over the meaning of a word that none of them can produce on request.
Went woke, did not go broke
The reason this keeps happening is that it has always happened, and the pattern is old enough now that you can set your watch by it.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens got the treatment for Rey before “woke” was even the standard word, opened to $450.8 million worldwide, and finished at $2.07 billion. Beauty and the Beast got boycott campaigns over LeFou in 2017 and opened to a $357 million global weekend that stood as the record for a female-fronted film, ending at $1.26 billion. Wonder Woman absorbed years of nonsense about Gal Gadot’s casting, some of it openly anti-semitic, and did $841 million globally. Black Panther became the first film since Avatar to top the box office five straight weekends, with $605.4 million domestic and over $1.1 billion worldwide.
Captain Marvel is the purest case of the bunch, because the review-bombing campaign ran for months before a single ticket was sold and Rotten Tomatoes had to change its policies over it. The film opened to $153 million domestic and $455 million globally, the sixth-best opening in history at that point, and cleared a billion dollars on its way out. The AP’s headline at the time said the movie had answered its doubters, its trolls and a pernicious Hollywood myth, which was generous, because the myth is still here.
Since the pandemic it’s been Barbie at $1.4 billion, Wicked setting the opening-day record for a musical adaptation after a year of pile-ons aimed at Cynthia Erivo, and then Sinners at $367 million against a $90 million budget and Superman at $616 million against $224 million in the same year.
The one they always bring up
Which brings us to Snow White, the trophy on the other side’s mantle, and the one film in this argument I’d rather concede than dance around. It made $205.6 million worldwide against a production budget somewhere between $240 and $270 million. That’s a genuine disaster, and there is no version of the numbers that isn’t.
Rachel Zegler also gave them a lot to work with, and it’s worth separating what she actually did. The objection to her casting started in 2021, before she’d said anything about anything, and that part is the standard grievance. Her 2022 comments about the original being of its time and centering a prince who stalks the heroine were about the film. But in August 2024 she appended “free palestine” to a post thanking fans for the trailer, which coincided with a spike in death threats against her Israeli co-star and sent producer Marc Platt to New York to ask her to delete it. She declined. Three months later, after the election, she posted that she hoped Trump and his voters never knew peace. Platt reportedly told her she was signaling to a substantial chunk of America that the movie wasn’t for them.
That’s the strongest sentence anyone on that side of this has managed, and notice what it’s actually about. A star telling a large slice of the ticket-buying public to get bent four months before release is a claim about conduct. It has nothing to do with who a director casts, which is the thing the term “woke” is normally deployed against. The two get welded together because keeping them separate would ruin the slogan.
And then Disney ran the experiment for us. This July they released a live-action Moana with a Samoan-Australian actress playing a Polynesian character, Dwayne Johnson reprising Maui, and not one member of the cast posting anything about anything. It opened to $43 million domestic, which is within a million dollars of Snow White‘s $42.2 million, on the same $250 million budget, and Variety projects it will lose around $100 million. Its critic score is 34 percent, lower than Snow White‘s 38. Audiences liked it fine, giving it an A-minus CinemaScore. They just didn’t go.
Line the princess remakes up in order and the shape is hard to miss. Beauty and the Beast did $1.26 billion in 2017. Aladdin did $1.05 billion in 2019. The Little Mermaid managed $569 million in 2023 against $250 million and $140 million in marketing. Snow White did $205 million in 2025. Moana opened to $95 million worldwide this month. The curve was already falling before anybody had heard of Rachel Zegler, and it kept right on falling after she left the building.
Variety’s read on why is the same thing this whole piece has been about. Wait too long and the cultural resonance is gone, which is Snow White and Dumbo. Move too fast and the nostalgia hasn’t had time to build, which is Moana arriving less than two years after Moana 2. Either way you’re asking someone to pay $13 and drive somewhere to see a thing they’ve already seen, that is sitting on Disney+ right now.
Which is exactly where Snow White went. It hit Disney+ on June 11 last year, went straight to number one on the platform, and stayed in the global top ten for 90 consecutive days. It was the number two title on Fandango at Home the week it went digital. The movie that supposedly proves audiences reject this stuff got watched by an enormous number of people the moment it stopped costing money and a car trip.
Disney’s own response is the tell. They didn’t announce a change to casting policy. They reportedly put the whole remake pipeline on hold, with Tangled the biggest casualty and Aladdin 2 and Maleficent 3 also shelved. The people with money on the table diagnosed the problem as the movies.
Meanwhile, in the flop department
Movies lose staggering amounts of money every single month, and almost none of it has anything to do with casting or politics or whatever this week’s grievance is. Nobody organizes a movement around it, because there’s nothing in it for anybody.
John Carter cost Disney $350 million all in, made $284.1 million worldwide, and produced a $200 million write-down. Two years later a Disney executive was asked whether the later release windows had recouped any of it and answered, honestly, that it didn’t get much better. The Lone Ranger put Johnny Depp in a western on roughly $375 million in total budget estimates and grossed $260.5 million, for an estimated $190 million loss. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword had a $175 million budget, made just over $146 million worldwide, lost about $150 million, and took a planned six-film series down with it. Add Mars Needs Moms, Pan, Tomorrowland, Battleship, Pompeii, Transcendence, Ben-Hur, Allied and The BFG, and understand that this list could go on for another page.
Nobody has ever written a think piece about the anti-Hugh-Jackman agenda.
But since we’re here, let’s do the specifics, because the specifics are funnier.
2014’s The Legend of Hercules was a $70 million budgeted action film that limped to a measly $18.8 million domestic and $61 million worldwide. With nary a ‘social justice’ crumb in sight, this totally proves that if you don’t get woke, you go broke!
The Expendables series was an exercise in Alpha-male diminishing returns. The first two entries managed to make a profit, but by the third go ’round, and its $39 million domestic take against a $90 million budget, the old guys who starred in these 80s cold warrior-inspired movies would need more than Viagra to get it up for a fourth one. Perhaps if they’d gone woke, they wouldn’t have gone broke, right?
The Japanese macho adventure (hey, writer John Tucker’s description, not mine) 47 Ronin boasted a budget of $175 million. But even its theme of vengeance and samurai sword play wasn’t enough to impress moviegoers. It committed hari kari after its dishonorable $38 million domestic take, and Universal ended up writing the entire $175 million off. Shoulda’ went woke!
Assassin’s Creed was lavishly filmed but couldn’t escape its own testosterone soaked aggressive machismo long enough to be even mildly entertaining, unless this is the kind of stuff you like. Not that there’s many of you out there. The 2016 film was assassinated at the domestic box office with $55 million against a $125 million budget, and the international take didn’t save it either, since the studio still came out an estimated $90 million in the hole and cancelled the sequel. But if they’d JUST gone woke…
I actually like 2010’s The A-Team, even though film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it “an incomprehensible mess” and criticized the film for being as shallow as the television series, as most critics did. Just like its small-screen counterpart, some found parts of it condescending to women. Maybe had they been a little nicer to the girls, they would have done a little better at the bank.
2012’s Dredd is a great example of a comic book movie that reveled in its decidedly non-wokeness. Then it crashed and burned, closing its domestic run at $13.4 million against a $45 million budget and leaving most of a $25 million marketing spend in the red. Choke on it, Dredd.
So what was any of this ever about
The ladder is the whole story. Every rung got invented after the previous one collapsed, and the top rung is a number nobody can source or defend. That’s the tell, because go woke go broke has never once been used to predict anything. It only ever gets applied backwards. A film with a Black lead loses money and the casting did it. A film with a Black lead clears a billion dollars and it turns out it was never woke to begin with, or it won in spite of itself, or the numbers are fake. A film with an all-white cast and no politics anywhere in it loses two hundred million dollars and nobody says a word, because there’s nobody to be angry at. Any rule that explains every outcome after the fact while forecasting none of them in advance is a mood with a slogan stapled to it, which is exactly why the goalposts have to keep moving.
And this is the part that should have ended the whole conversation a decade ago. Hollywood has been releasing movies for a hundred and twenty years, at a clip of around eight hundred a year in the twenties and thirties and several hundred a year ever since, which puts the total somewhere in the tens of thousands. An enormous share of them lost money. The overwhelming majority of those failures had nothing in them that anybody could call woke, and most of them came and went decades before the word meant any of this. They lost the money anyway. So if go woke go broke is a real rule, then the far better rule, the one carrying a century of receipts and tens of thousands of pictures behind it, is the one nobody wants to print on a hat: didn’t go woke, went broke.
So yes, Christopher Nolan drove a stake through go woke go broke, and he did it with $652 million in eleven days and a second weekend that barely moved, in front of everybody, while the loudest believers turned on each other over whether they were allowed to like his movie. The dead slogan will twitch for a while yet. Somebody will point it at the next film with a woman on the poster. But a great many people watched this thing run into an actual set of numbers this summer and come apart, and you don’t come back from being that publicly wrong that fast.
The thing I keep coming back to is that Nolan never engaged with any of it. He didn’t do the apology tour, he didn’t clarify anything, he didn’t sit for the interview where a director explains that art has always reinterpreted myth. He just made the movie he was making and put it in theaters, and the audience showed up in numbers the industry hasn’t seen since before the world shut down. There’s something almost restful about it after ten years of studios flinching.
The Odyssey hasn’t opened in China yet. Ask me again in September what the break-even number is. Somebody will have a new one by then.
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