The Odyssey outdrew Digger 3.7 to 1 per cinema in its 13th weekend

The Odyssey took an estimated $2m in North America over the weekend of 9 to 11 October, its 13th on release, from 560 cinemas. That works out at $3,571 a cinema. Digger, in its second weekend and playing in 3,321 of them, averaged $964.

Divide one by the other. Christopher Nolan's three-month-old film outdrew Alejandro G. Iñárritu's new one 3.7 to 1 for every building it played in. Seven days earlier, Digger had taken its IMAX screens.

Both figures are Sunday estimates, and they come from the weekend charts published by Box Office Mojo and The Numbers, which agree on them to the dollar. Neither tracker splits IMAX from ordinary auditoriums, so the 560 is every cinema still showing the film, whatever the size of the screen. The comparison is cinema against cinema, which is the only one the public data allows.

What one week out of IMAX cost

Universal released The Odyssey on 17 July and kept it on premium screens through the end of September. On 2 October those screens passed to Warner Bros and Digger, which Iñárritu shot on VistaVision film and which stars Tom Cruise, the kind of title the format exists for.

The effect on the older film shows up in its own weekly table. In the weekend of 2 to 4 October it took $1,298,085 from 662 cinemas, a fall of 66%, the steepest of its entire run by a distance (the next worst was 43%, back in its third weekend). Its average dropped to $1,961 a cinema. Across the full seven days from 2 to 8 October, going by The Numbers' running total, it added $1,809,280.

Then Universal said on Tuesday 6 October, as TheWrap reported, that the film would go back into IMAX and 70mm from that Friday. Nothing else changed. The film was in its 13th week and lost another 102 cinemas, yet the weekend rose 54% to $2m.

So three days back on the big screens earned more than the whole of the previous week away from them: $2m against $1.81m. The average per cinema went up 82%, from $1,961 to $3,571, which puts it within $153 of the $3,724 the film was averaging in the last weekend of September, when it was still in 1,021 cinemas.

The film that took the screens

Digger opened to $8,001,856 from 3,321 cinemas, according to The Numbers, and fell 60% to an estimated $3.2m in its second weekend without losing a single location. On the Saturday, the biggest day of the weekend for both films, it took $1,225,000 to The Odyssey's $840,000, which means a film in its 13th week was doing 69% of the business of one in its second. After ten days it has $14.4m in North America, on a film greenlit at $125m and reported by Deadline, via tbreak, to have cost about $160m by the time it wrapped. We set out what it needed to break even before it opened. It is not going to get there.

Put the two weekends side by side. On 2 to 4 October, with Digger new and holding the premium screens, The Odyssey took 16% of what Digger did. A week later, with the screens returned, it took 62.5% of Digger's weekend ($2m against $3.2m) from 17% of the cinemas (560 against 3,321).

It also had the second-best average in the top ten. Only Other Mommy, the weekend's number one, did better, at $8,172 a cinema on its opening. Verity, in its second weekend, averaged $3,214. Digger was ninth of the ten, ahead of the new release Angel and the Badman at $911. For a sense of how unusual that is for an old film, Disney's Avengers: Endgame re-release, which topped the chart a fortnight ago, averaged $800 from 1,750 cinemas in its third weekend.

Who decided, and when

Empire and GamesRadar both tied the return directly to Digger's opening, and the dates support them: the Warner film opened on a Friday, the weekend numbers landed on the Sunday, and Universal's announcement came two days after that. Universal did not mention Digger, and TheWrap's report of the announcement does not either. Studios rarely name the film they are replacing.

It is hard to blame IMAX for the original booking. A new large-format film from the director of The Revenant, with Cruise in the lead, against a release entering its 12th week looks like an easy call on paper. The calendar could not know which film people still wanted. For one week it moved the scarcest screens in the business from the bigger draw to the smaller one. A slot system that cannot bend to a film still averaging more than every new release bar one is leaving money in the car park.

The total involved is small beside what The Odyssey has already done. Its domestic gross stands at $622,973,000, and Universal put the worldwide figure at $1.76bn when it announced the return, a number that had already made it the studio's biggest film ever. An extra $700,000 on a weekend does not move that. What it does is give exhibitors a clean, one-week experiment in what an IMAX screen is worth to a film people want, with almost every other variable held still.

It lasted a week, and it will not run much longer. Empire reports that Street Fighter takes over IMAX screens from Friday 16 October, which gives The Odyssey seven days back, exactly as long as Digger had them to itself. London's BFI IMAX, by the same report, is showing both films until Thursday 15 October.