World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Nolan breaks his own record. Focus Features bets on a dying man’s Hamlet. And an Indian legend’s son follows his father into the same London hospital.
Here’s what happened in the world of movies during the last 24 hours.
The Odyssey just posted the best second weekend of Christopher Nolan’s career. $87 million, beating out The Dark Knight, and doing it as an R-rated film no less — only Deadpool & Wolverine has ever managed a bigger second-weekend haul at that rating. The drop from opening weekend was a mere 29.6%, which sits in genuinely elite company: better retention than Wicked: Part One, better than Top Gun: Maverick. It’s now crossed $1 billion worldwide (the third Hollywood release to do it this year), and I’ll admit I don’t entirely trust anyone still arguing over whether $1.2 billion or $1.8 billion is the “real” benchmark for success here — the film has already done the hard part, which is get people to go back for round two.
Meanwhile Focus Features has acquired Elsinore, Simon Stone’s film about Ian Charleson — the Scottish actor who played Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire and then, in 1990, gave what’s remembered as one of the great Hamlets at the National Theatre while dying of AIDS-related illness, weeks before his death at 40. Andrew Scott plays Charleson; Olivia Colman is his doctor, which reunites the two Fleabag co-stars in a register about as far from that show as you can get. Focus is opening it November 20 with an expansion through the end of November (Thanksgiving of course in the US) — straight into the middle of awards season, which tells you exactly how confident they are in what they’ve bought. Can’t wait for this one… I love Andrew Scott in everything he does. With Scott in the D-Day meteorological drama “Pressure”, coming out in the UK in September, is THIS the year when Andrew Scott will get his much deserved first Oscar nomination?
And there’s a smaller, sadder story out of India. Suneil Anand, the only son of Indian acting legend Dev Anand, died in London on the 26th, at the same hospital where his father died in 2011. He was 70. Not a headline that’ll travel far outside the trade press, but worth sitting with for a second — there’s something quietly brutal about that particular coincidence of geography.
A few other things worth knowing about, in brief:
- Venice unveiled its 2026 lineup, opening with Danny Boyle’s Ink on September 2. The competition slate reads like a murderers’ row of festival regulars — Herzog, Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, Nanni Moretti — and Robert Pattinson, Penélope Cruz and Alicia Vikander are all expected on the Lido. Alberto Barbera also confirmed Noel and Liam Gallagher will show up for the Oasis reunion documentary premiere, which is either a masterstroke of festival programming or the most 2026 sentence I’ve typed all week.
- Toronto’s Primetime lineup dropped too, spotlighting the festival’s growing television wing — Gary Oldman, Jon Hamm, Bérénice Bejo and Carrie-Anne Moss all attached to series premiering there ahead of TIFF’s main run in September.
- UK-Ireland box office is up 14% year-on-year for the first half of 2026, according to the UK trade press, with Toy Story 5 currently fending off Minions & Monsters for the top spot — a genuinely charming fight between a legacy franchise and an upstart, and not the one I’d have predicted in January…. I’d have expected the Toy Story gang to romp home.
That’s all for today. I’m not sure I’ll get to post this round up every day, but when I do it will be with a round up for the news since I last posted. Let me know if you find this new set of posts useful!
Subscribe
Don’t forget, you can subscribe to One Mann’s Movies to receive future reviews by email right here. No salesman will call!