“The Odyssey” continued to exert a mighty hold on moviegoers in its second weekend in North American theaters, with $87 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday. That’s only a 30% drop from its first weekend, an incredibly modest slide for a blockbuster. It’s also filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s best second weekend ever, not accounting for inflation. In 2008, “The Dark Knight” earned $75.2 million in weekend two.
“That would be an impressive opening weekend for any film,” said Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak’s head of marketplace trends. “This is a testament to the outpouring of excitement and enthusiasm that moviegoers are having for Christopher Nolan’s latest epic.”
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Tom Holland attends the premiere of "The Odyssey" at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Zendaya attends the premiere of "The Odyssey" at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Workers install a hand-painted billboard, painted by artist Virginia Axioti, for Christopher Nolan's upcoming film "The Odyssey," starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, outside Athens' Athinaion cinema, Saturday, July 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Matt Damon, from left, director Christopher Nolan, and Anne Hathaway attend the premiere of "The Odyssey" at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
With $128.3 million from international theaters, “The Odyssey” has made an estimated $639.6 million globally. Theaters around the world are adding showtimes to try to meet the demand, Dergarabedian said.
As with last weekend, much of that sum is from premium large format screens. IMAX screens alone accounted for $48 million of the global earnings this weekend. The coveted 70 mm IMAX screens, of which there are only 41 worldwide, earned $5.2 million. Most of those showtimes are sold out through September, the company said.
There was no significant new competition this weekend or last. Regardless, the second weekend earnings is rare for a movie that opened over $100 million. For an R-rated movie, it’s second only to “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
But the open waters will become a little more crowded next weekend when audiences get another blockbuster option with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which shares actors Tom Holland and Zendaya with “The Odyssey.” Some analysts say that “Spider-Man” could net the biggest opening weekend of the year. Still, Nolan’s film will have its run of most IMAX screens for weeks to come.
Second and third place went to Disney releases, “Moana,” with $10.5 million, and “Toy Story 5” close behind with $10 million. The latter surpassed $1 billion in its fifth weekend, with $448 million from domestic theaters and $573 million from international screens. It’s the sixth Pixar film to hit the milestone.
Bleecker Street’s release of “Hadestown: The Musical,” a live stage recording of the show, rounded out the top five with $9.7 million in its first weekend. The hit Broadway show uses folk and jazz to tell an ancient Greek tale.
Olivia Wilde’s chamber dramedy “The Invite” also continues to do well in its platform release, with another $2.6 million that brings its running total to $19.8 million.
The year overall is running about 10% ahead of last year, and the summer box office this weekend surpassed $3 billion. Before the pandemic, the summer movie season would regularly exceed $4 billion. The only other time it has since was the “Barbenheimer” in 2023. Dergarabedian is cautiously optimistic that it could be within reach this summer too.
“That’s a pretty heavy lift for August, but this could be a mega August given the staying power of ‘The Odyssey’ coupled with ’Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” he said. “For `The Odyssey’ it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon run that’ll play well into August.”
With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Rentrak:
1. “The Odyssey,” $87 million.
2. “Moana,” $10.5 million.
3. “Toy Story 5,” $10 million.
4. “Minions & Monsters,” $9.7 million.
5. “Hadestown,” $9.6 million.
6. “The Invite,” $2.6 million.
7. “Evil Dead Burn,” $2.6 million.
8. “Young Washington,” $2 million.
9. “Motor City,” $1.6 million.
10. “Obsession,” $1.5 million.
Tom Holland attends the premiere of "The Odyssey" at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Zendaya attends the premiere of "The Odyssey" at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Workers install a hand-painted billboard, painted by artist Virginia Axioti, for Christopher Nolan's upcoming film "The Odyssey," starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, outside Athens' Athinaion cinema, Saturday, July 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Matt Damon, from left, director Christopher Nolan, and Anne Hathaway attend the premiere of "The Odyssey" at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
To be fair, James Cameron did warn us.
Long before OpenAI broke out of its test corral and hacked into Hugging Face, before the internet and Sam Altman were even born, Cameron wrote a screenplay about an autonomous artificial intelligence system that triggers a nuclear apocalypse.
That system, “Skynet,” was solidly science fiction — and, for its day, pure speculation. But four decades after it appeared in “The Terminator,” it looks more like a forecast of the “unprecedented cyber incident” in which a rogue artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own.
Cue “Skynet Day,” the new shorthand for July 22, 2026, when real-life AI sent a chill around the world by learning and acting in ways its creators did not anticipate.
For many, the moment recalled the instant in “Aliens” (also written by Cameron) when the xenomorph queen learns to use an elevator. Or when the “Jurassic Park's” velociraptors figure out how to open a door. Or the sequence in which the self-aware HAL 9000 reads the astronauts’ lips and decides to kill them in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” That one came out in 1968.
Have we learned nothing since then? Those movies merely envisioned how people looking to make money or build power would drive technology forward — until it becomes self-aware, strategic and highly problematic for humanity. The question all along has been Frankensteinian: What if it breaks out?
So far, slo-mo government offers little protection from the light-speed progress of AI. The U.S. Defense Department is rapidly accelerating its use of AI. Humanity can't even agree on whether and which guardrails are needed to rein in rogue agents. To the contrary, people are marveling at the wonder of AI and snapping up its benefits, despite the risks to jobs,mental health, the balance of war and peace — and, potentially, humanity as we know it.
In what OpenAI said was the first-ever incident of its kind, an advanced AI model escaped its “sandbox” to the internet and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face. It was a told-you-so moment for researchers who had warned for years that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity. Others said the moment was a warning that underscored the need for stronger AI defensive engineering.
Either way, the breakout was widely considered a cautionary tale about the risks of uncontrolled AI.
“Yesterday, as we huddled around our computers reading the report, I told the team to “remember this moment” as the first true AI safety incident,” Logan Graham, head of Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team, posted on X after it happened.
Generative AI is growing so fast that government and evaluation systems are struggling to keep pace with the technology. Countries around the world are cobbling together their own laws, some conflicting. The technology was adopted by nearly 53% of the world's population in three years, faster than the spread of the PC or the internet, according to a study released this year by Stanford University.
To be clear, the “Skynet” of the "Terminator" movies is not at hand.
Those films begin with a self-aware military computer network that views humanity as a threat. In a bid for self-preservation, “Skynet” sends an army of cyborgs designed to resemble humans back in time to assassinate resistance fighters. In the second film, the Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, tells heroine Sarah Connor that “Skynet” goes online on August 4, 1997.
“Human decisions are removed from strategic defense,” he says. “Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate.” At 2:14 a.m. on August 29 — Judgment Day — the network becomes self-aware and launches an attack on Russia to provoke a counterstrike on the United States. Three billion lives are lost.
That would have been 29 years ago next month if it had happened. And throughout sequels and spinoffs, the central theme is humans versus a world-spanning network of machines.
It's unlikely that Cameron was actually ringing a warning bell the way, say, director Kathryn Bigelow tried to do with last year's nuclear weapon film, “A House of Dynamite.” Legend has it that the idea for “The Terminator” started with Cameron suffering a food sickness-induced fever dream, not a premonition about AI.
Anytime AI oversteps our comfort level, it raises the alarming question of who, or what, really controls our lives.
For many, a world with machines in charge can be hard to imagine without movies and books and their sometimes prescient visions. See: “The Matrix,” “Ex Machina” and “The Minority Report” for some of the many sci-fi takes on the perils of machines. Or dive deeper, into Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” It's an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of machines — and the basis for the 1982 film “Blade Runner.”
But “The Terminator” franchise wields outsize influence over more than culture. The very title is real-world shorthand for technology's role in deciding who lives and who dies — and how the military should respond to any truly autonomous attacks.
“I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger,” Cameron said in an interview on CTV in 2023. “You have no ability to de-escalate.”
The real world offers several examples of technology and military policy coming uncomfortably close to “Terminator” imagery.
Israel's use of AI in its recent wars mark a leading instance. In early 2021, it launched Gospel, an AI tool that sorts through Israel’s vast array of digitized information to suggest targets for potential strikes. It also developed Lavender, which uses machine learning to filter out requested criteria from intelligence databases and narrow down lists of potential targets, including people.
Lavender ranks people between 0 and 100 based on how likely it is they are a militant, an intelligence officer who used the systems told The Associated Press. The Israeli military says its analysts use AI-enabled systems to help identify targets but independently examine them together with high-ranking officers to meet international law, weighing military advantage against the collateral damage.
For some, the revelation — and the death toll in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel — came too close for comfort to the kill lists of science fiction. “Well guys, Skynet is Here and its has a pleasant name (Lavender),” snarked one Redditor.
Not quite — but “Terminator” terminology is so familiar to the masses that U.S. officials sometimes use it to frame the ethical debate around the military uses of AI. The conventional red line would be crossed, it seems, when humans play no role in AI targeting and killing.
A state or other actor could use autonomous weapons to inflict lethal force on its enemies, military officials allow. That would mean a machine, as then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Paul Selva described it in 2016, “like a Terminator that adds incredible amounts of complexity with no conscience to what happens on the battlefield.”
What would come next, he called “the Terminator conundrum," the problem of technology that can make life-or-death decisions and execute them before people have agreed on the law or the rules.
“Skynet” and its cyborgs remain in the fictional realm. But in the fast-moving landscape of AI development, the ethical and moral questions raised by “The Terminator” are more relevant than ever.
“The Skynet problem," Cameron said in a 2024 video, "is an actual thing.”
FILE - Sam Altman, center, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, right, arrive at the U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., April 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez, File)
FILE - The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cell phone in front of an image generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
