The Odyssey just became Universal's highest-grossing movie ever

In terms of The Great Bag-Fumblings Of Cinematic History, it’s really hard not to rank Warner Bros. pissing off Christopher Nolan at somewhere near the top. Nolan spent an epic 18 years as a good company man paying back the studio for taking a chance on him after the success of Memento, making them huge stacks of cash while scoring repeated critical acclaim for movies like Interstellar and his Dark Knight trilogy. But the studio, apparently unwittingly, torched all that goodwill in 2020, when it massively underestimated just how furious Nolan would be when it shoved his sci-fi action film Tenet onto streaming in the interest of lockdown-era financial concerns. (Which suggests a pretty massive misunderstanding of Christopher Nolan, who, unlike some Ithacan kings we could name, is not a complicated man when it comes to his professional desires: the biggest, loudest movies in the world, running in the biggest, loudest theaters imaginable.) Nolan broke ties with Warner Bros. pretty much immediately, ignoring their efforts to bribe him back into the fold, and taking his last two movies, Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, out on the open market, where they both ended up at Universal.