After weeks of underperformers and outright flops at the box office, theaters have a huge hit again with Universal/Syncopy’s “The Odyssey,” which earned a $51 million opening day from 3,989 theaters — including $17.6 million from Thursday previews — and is now looking at a domestic opening weekend of at least $120 million domestic and $250 million worldwide.

If it can keep overperforming estimates through the rest of the weekend, it will pass the unadjusted $123.4 million opening of the 2017 horror film “It” to become the fourth highest domestic opening ever for an R-rated movie, topped only by Marvel’s “Deadpool” trilogy.

And among director Christopher Nolan’s films, this marks the third highest opening weekend of his career, surpassed only the $158.4 million opening of “The Dark Knight” in 2008 and the $160.8 million opening of its 2012 follow-up, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

This is exactly the start that “The Odyssey” needed to have a chance to join those two Batman films in the $1 billion box office club, as early audience reception has been just as wildly strong as the critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 95% critics and 97% audience score to go with an A on CinemaScore, the same grade that Nolan’s “Dark Knight” films and his 2023 Oscar winner “Oppenheimer” earned.

While we won’t know the ceiling for “The Odyssey” until we see how it performs against Sony’s wildly anticipated “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in August, there’s no doubt that with this strong start and word-of-mouth, Universal’s big bet on Nolan by giving him a reported $250 million budget to bring this sword-and-sandal epic to life will pay off in a big way. If it legs out to $1 billion, it will be the fourth film this year to do so and the third from Universal, which released Illumination’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and handled overseas distribution on Lionsgate’s “Michael.”

In second is Disney’s remake of “Moana” with a $20 million second weekend, bringing the struggling film’s 10-day total to $82.7 million. Thanks to decent footholds with families with kids too young to see “The Odyssey,” “Moana” will at least be able to outgross last year’s Disney remake bomb “Snow White.” But this $200 million tentpole is still falling short of theatrical profitability.

Better news for Disney is coming from Pixar’s “Toy Story 5,” which is crossing $900 million worldwide on its fifth weekend with a $14 million domestic total for this frame. That puts it in a narrow race for the No. 3 slot with Universal/Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters,” which is in its third weekend.