The Universal Pictures release crossed the 10-million admissions mark at around 4 p.m. Sunday, according to the distributor, reaching the milestone on its 33rd day in theaters.
It is the second Korean film-market release this year to top 10 million admissions, following director Jang Hang-jun's The King's Warden, and the first foreign film released in 2026 to reach the threshold.
No imported movie had drawn 10 million viewers in Korea since Avatar: The Way of Water four years ago.
The Odyssey is Nolan's second film to surpass 10 million admissions in Korea after Interstellar, underscoring an unusually strong relationship between the British-American filmmaker and Korean audiences.
Nolan has cultivated a strong fan base in Korea over more than a decade through films including The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer.
In Korea, his name has increasingly become a draw in itself, promising ambitious storytelling coupled with the kind of visual scale that audiences regard as worth leaving home to experience.
The Odyssey takes that proposition even further. The film, based on Homer's ancient Greek epic, follows Odysseus on his perilous journey home after the Trojan War, pitting human will against gods, monsters and the sea.
Nolan shot the entire film using IMAX film cameras, a first in cinema history, and relied heavily on location shooting, live stunts and practical effects rather than computer-generated imagery.
The result has been marketed and embraced in Korea as a movie that demands the largest possible screen and sound system.
Premium-format tickets were snapped up before release, with coveted IMAX seats becoming difficult to obtain and some appearing on resale markets at prices exceeding 100,000 won ($74).
The appetite persisted well beyond opening weekend. The Odyssey passed 5 million admissions on its 13th day, 7 million on its 19th and 8 million after 24 days. It reached 9 million on day 27, three days faster than Avatar: The Way of Water.
Even in its fifth week, the film continued to lead advance ticket sales and remained at the top of the box office.
The momentum has allowed it to surpass the final Korean admissions totals of the biggest foreign releases of each of the previous three years: Pixar's Elemental with 7.24 million in 2023, Inside Out 2 with 8.79 million in 2024 and Zootopia 2 with 8.61 million in 2025.
Nolan's decision to visit Seoul before the release appears to have added to the sense of occasion.
The director arrived in August with producer Emma Thomas and actors Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, meeting Korean media and fans during a promotional tour. Clips and interviews from the visit circulated widely online in the weeks leading up to opening day.
Korea has long been one of the overseas markets where Nolan's films perform particularly strongly, and the visit reinforced the perception among fans that the country occupies a special place in the director's global audience.
Yet perhaps the clearest indication of the film's hold on Korea can be found away from multiplexes.
Kyobo Book Centre said sales of books related to The Odyssey and Homer's Odyssey jumped roughly 600 percent in July from a year earlier.
By the second week of August, related titles had climbed to No. 2 on overall bestseller lists at both Kyobo and Yes24, with demand spreading across full translations, children's editions, young-adult versions and e-books.
Digital reading platform Millie's Library recorded a 3.3-fold increase in searches for "Odyssey" after the film's release, while searches for "Greek and Roman mythology" jumped 3.6 times.
A similar ripple has reached museums. A special exhibition titled "Greece, the Great Civilization Shaped by the Sea," which opened Aug. 11 at the National Incheon Maritime Museum, has attracted interest from moviegoers with displays covering 6,000 years of Greek history, including material connected to Odysseus and Agamemnon.
The crossover from multiplexes to bookshelves and exhibition halls suggests that The Odyssey has tapped into something broader than conventional blockbuster enthusiasm.
It also stands out in a global movie market increasingly dominated by sequels, superheroes and established entertainment franchises.
Nolan has effectively taken one of Western civilization's oldest stories and transformed it into a modern event movie without relying on a contemporary cinematic franchise.
Globally, the wager has paid off. The film opened at No. 1 in 69 countries and generated a worldwide opening of about $264 million, the biggest of Nolan's career. Its global box office had surpassed $1.56 billion as of Sunday, according to Box Office Mojo.
In Korea, however, its impact is now being measured not only in ticket sales.
For a generation accustomed to encountering ancient Greece in schoolbooks, The Odyssey has turned Homer into something closer to pop culture — and made the nearly 3,000-year journey home feel, at least for Korean audiences, like the movie event of the year.
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