Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has spent the past month collecting box office records like Odysseus collected reasons to not make it home on time. It became Nolan’s biggest movie, conquered IMAX and kept climbing. Now it has taken another record, and this one came directly out of Ryan Reynolds’ trophy case. If nothing else, at least Reynolds is magnanimous about the whole thing.
The Odyssey has officially passed Deadpool & Wolverine to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, topping the Marvel movie’s $1.338 billion worldwide haul. The actor behind the Merc with a Mouth acknowledged the changing of the guard with an appropriately stupid joke on his Instagram, congratulating Nolan’s cast and crew while slipping in a reference to one of Deadpool & Wolverine’s best running gags. Check out the video below.
Editing one of The Odyssey’s tensest scenes, with Odysseus and his men facing the cannibal giants, as if it were happening in the same forest as Deadpool and Wolverine’s brutal car fight is appropriately ridiculous. Throwing Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta singing “You’re the One That I Want” over the whole thing somehow makes it even stranger.
That final line in Reynolds’ caption is, of course, a nod to the Honda Odyssey. He wrote:
Congratulations to the entire cast and crew of The Odyssey for becoming the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time. That is one helluva car.
The accompanying video pulls from Deadpool & Wolverine’s spectacularly violent fight inside the Honda Odyssey, where Wade Wilson and Logan spend an absurd amount of time beating each other senseless. Deadpool starts the sequence trashing the minivan, only to change his tune once he realizes just how much punishment the thing can take.
So when another Odyssey came along and knocked Reynolds’ movie out of the top spot, he apparently decided the proper response was to mash the two together. Fair enough.
Reynolds had enjoyed bragging rights since Deadpool & Wolverine passed Joker in 2024. The MCU team-up finished its theatrical run with more than $1.33 billion globally, an astonishing total for an R-rated movie, a new superhero movie or otherwise, and one that looked difficult to touch. But never count Nolan out, as he managed it two years later with Homer.
This is only the latest milestone for a movie that has been bulldozing through records since its 2026 movie calendar release. Earlier this month, The Odyssey passed The Dark Knight Rises to become Nolan’s highest-grossing movie worldwide. That was a record Nolan had held against himself since 2012. The movie also became the highest-grossing IMAX release ever, passing Avatar, after generating $289 million in the premium format.
As of Aug. 19, The Odyssey had crossed $1.34 billion worldwide, enough to move past Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s Marvel blockbuster for the R-rated crown. The movie also still has some international runway left, which means that total is not finished growing.
At this point, I am running out of ways to be surprised by The Odyssey’s box office performance. A three-hour Christopher Nolan page-to-screen adaptation of Homer becoming a major hit was difficult to imagine, even after the success of Oppenheimer. Watching it start knocking down records previously held by Avatar and Deadpool & Wolverine is another thing entirely.
Ryan Reynolds, at least, seems to be taking the dethroning well. Besides, Deadpool & Wolverine still has one distinction Nolan cannot steal from it: I am fairly certain Odysseus never called his vessel a Honda fucking Odyssey. That has to count for something.
