THE ODYSSEY has officially become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, sailing past $1.34 billion worldwide on Aug. 19 to overtake DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE’s two-year-old record of $1.338 billion, Variety reported.
“Congratulations to the entire cast and crew of THE ODYSSEY for becoming the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time,” DEADPOOL star Ryan Reynolds wrote on social media.
Director Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic opened July 17 through Universal Pictures and needed only five weeks to cross $1 billion. It has now pulled in more than $500 million domestically and roughly $780 million overseas, according to box office figures reported by SFF Gazette, compared to DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE’s $636.7 million domestic haul for Disney and Marvel Studios in 2024.
Nolan fought for that R rating from the start, telling Empire he wanted “the most intense version” of the story, since ancient “weapons of the time — swords and bows and arrows — are more brutal” than a PG-13 cut could handle, according to World of Reel.
That’s where Movieguide®’s own numbers get interesting. Both movies earned the same three out of four stars for craft from Movieguide® reviewers, but their content ratings landed worlds apart. THE ODYSSEY scored a -2 on Movieguide®’s +4 to -4 acceptability scale, while DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE bottomed out at -4, the “Abhorrent” designation Movieguide® reserves for its most objectionable content.
Related: THE ODYSSEY Sails to Record-Breaking Opening
“What the film exalts…is largely what Scripture exalts,” Movieguide®’s review of THE ODYSSEY found, pointing to “a husband fighting his way home, a wife whose faithfulness outlasts a decade of pressure” and “hospitality treated as sacred, evil answered by justice.”
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE told a different kind of story. Movieguide®’s review counted more than 140 obscenities and prolonged, brutal violence beneath what it called a “strong pagan, slightly mixed, irreverent, often lawless worldview,” even while crediting the movie’s sacrificial-love throughline.
“Sacrifice, not violence, is what ultimately resolves the story’s central conflict,” the review noted, though that message arrived nearly drowned out by everything piled on top of it.
None of this is new territory for Movieguide®. The outlet has measured box office receipts against content since 1991, and the pattern keeps repeating: movies with less objectionable content tend to out-earn the ones without it.
“Moviegoers greatly prefer family-friendly movies,” Movieguide® founder Dr. Ted Baehr said in one such report, noting that family-friendly movies averaged more than double the box office of the least family-friendly ones that year.
A more recent Movieguide® analysis found R-rated movies claiming their smallest share of the box office in more than 25 years, while movies free of explicit sex and nudity earned more than double what the most explicit ones did.
THE ODYSSEY is no Sunday school lesson — three gratuitous profanities, heavy violence and a witch turning men into pigs keep it squarely in R-rated, adults-only territory, per Movieguide®’s review. But measured against its closest competitor for the R-rated crown, it leans further toward what Movieguide® has argued for more than three decades: audiences keep rewarding stories where faithfulness, hospitality, and justice win out, even when Hollywood dresses them up as myth instead of Scripture.
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