Media & Advertising

Project Hail Mary grossed $683.6 million worldwide on a $200 million budget before arriving on Prime Video 105 days after its theatrical debut, a window closer to Disney's model than the 45-day standard most studios now use. The film's success reveals Amazon MGM's deliberate split strategy: prestige originals get full Hollywood-style downstream windows to maximize long-tail streaming value, while four-quadrant titles like Red One get 26-day windows designed to drive immediate Prime subscriber engagement. Understanding which model a film gets tells you more about Amazon MGM's business logic than any single box office number.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey arrives July 17 with the strongest advance ticket signal of his career — 28,000 BFI admissions in 24 hours, best AMC PLF presales since 2022 — while simultaneously carrying his most disliked trailer ever, driven by a layered backlash of casting objections, historical-accuracy complaints, and Elon Musk-amplified misinformation about Academy eligibility rules. The article maps how the film's IMAX 70mm scarcity strategy is designed to absorb that political friction by narrowing the first-weekend audience to a cinephile core before Spider-Man reclaims premium screens on July 31. Whether a classical literary adaptation can hold both records without one canceling the other is the commercial question the opening weekend will answer.