The Odyssey would be the biggest Best Picture winner since Titanic

Two films have won Best Picture with a billion dollars in the bank. Titanic is one. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is the other. That is the entire list, across ninety-eight ceremonies.

The Odyssey has taken $1,686,587,560 worldwide, which makes it the twelfth highest-grossing film ever released, according to Box Office Mojo. It is also, after Venice and Telluride, the film most people covering the race have at the front of it.

Put those two facts together and you get a slightly odd proposition. If Christopher Nolan's film wins on 14 March 2027, it does not merely join the billion-dollar club. It goes in at number two.

The arithmetic of a very short list

Titanic stands at $2,264,812,968 and won at the seventieth ceremony in 1998. The Return of the King stands at $1,149,453,674 and won at the seventy-sixth, on 29 February 2004. Those are the only two.

The Odyssey is $537,133,886 ahead of The Return of the King. It would be the second-biggest Best Picture winner in the Academy's history and the first billion-dollar winner in twenty-three years.

There is a detail in those two precedents that nobody mentions. Both opened in December, roughly three months before the vote that rewarded them, so neither had to hold a voter's attention for very long. The Odyssey opened in the summer. No billion-dollar winner has ever had to survive a wait like that, and it is a better reason to be nervous than anything the competition is doing.

The near-miss is the more interesting entry. Oppenheimer took $975,811,333 and won in 2024, which is to say it fell $24,188,667 short of the mark, or about two and a half per cent. The most commercially successful Best Picture winner of the modern era still did not manage a billion dollars, and it is the film everyone reaches for when they want to argue that the Academy has stopped being allergic to hits.

What the number does not tell you

Having established all of that, here is the part where I put it down again.

Box office does not vote. Roughly ten thousand Academy members do, and the last decade of results suggests they are not counting receipts when they fill in a preferential ballot. A film's gross tells you how many people bought a ticket, which is a different question from how a voting body composed largely of working film-makers feels about it in February.

The better argument for The Odyssey is not the money. It is that a Nolan film has finally arrived in a year where the competition is a Martin McDonagh picture rather than a studio's carefully positioned drama. Variety's post-Telluride read has The Odyssey and Wild Horse Nine at the front, with Project Hail Mary, La Bola Negra and Club Kid behind them, and Scott Feinberg's forecast for The Hollywood Reporter has broadly the same shape.

McDonagh has twice left Venice with a prize and twice failed to convert it into Best Picture, which is its own kind of data. His new film drew a thirteen-minute ovation on the Lido and has the advantage of being the sort of thing the Academy actually gives the award to.

The film that is not in the conversation at all

There is a second billion-dollar film in this year, and nobody has filed a single Oscar prediction about it.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has taken $2,452,109,003 worldwide. That is the third-highest total any film has ever reached, ahead of Titanic, and it arrived at that number partly by selling about a third fewer tickets than Star Wars did for a smaller headline figure. Between them, the two films have taken $4,138,696,563 this year.

One of them is the Best Picture frontrunner. The other is not in the race, and nobody involved expected it to be. That gap is not about quality, and it is not really about genre either, given that a superhero sequel and a Homeric epic are both large-budget spectacle with a director's name above the title. It is about which of the two had an awards campaign built around it from the start.

Why this keeps being the wrong argument

Every few years the industry has a version of this conversation, usually after a ratings drop, and it arrives at the same proposal: the Academy should reward the films people have seen. The proposal misunderstands what the award is measuring. Nobody thinks the Palme d'Or should go to whichever film sold the most tickets at Cannes.

Where the money does matter is in what it permits. The Odyssey cleared a billion dollars before a single voter saw a screener, which means Universal is campaigning from a position no other contender has: it does not need the award to make the film work. That frees a campaign to be patient, and patient campaigns tend to be the ones that survive January.

My own view is that the gross will end up mattering less than the release date. The Odyssey opened in the summer, and a film that voters watched fourteen months before they vote has to survive a lot of autumn. The counter-example is the year's most profitable film, made for $750,000, which nobody is campaigning at all. Money buys options. It does not buy memory.

The dates are set and they are the only thing in this race that is not speculation. Best Picture submissions close on 12 November. Nomination voting runs from 11 to 15 January 2027, nominees are announced on 21 January, final voting runs from 25 February to 4 March, and the ceremony is on 14 March at the Dolby Theatre. The Odyssey is still in cinemas, and its number has not stopped moving.