Jon Bernthal does not headline many movies, yet he keeps showing up in the projects that define each year, from Fury and Sicario to his Emmy-winning turn in The Bear and the Punisher role he’s now carried across three different Marvel eras. In 2026, that has become especially hard to miss, with Bernthal appearing in both of the year’s two biggest films.
He plays Frank Castle in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which has passed $2.4 billion worldwide, and Menelaus, the King of Sparta, in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It is that second film that has now reached another major box office milestone, with Nolan’s Homer adaptation crossing $1.7 billion worldwide and overtaking one of Disney’s biggest titles in the process.
‘The Odyssey’ Keeps Climbing The All-Time Box Office Chart
Per Box Office Mojo, The Odyssey sits at roughly $1.72 billion since opening on July 17, with about $610 million of that domestic and $1.11 billion from international markets. The latest number carries it past Inside Out 2, which had finished around $1.46 billion as the highest-grossing Hollywood animated film ever, and lifts The Odyssey to eleventh on the all-time worldwide chart. On its way up the list, the epic has already cleared Jurassic World to become Universal’s biggest film in the studio’s 114-year history, along with the totals of The Lion King (2019), The Avengers, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Barbie and Deadpool & Wolverine.
That last one matters more than the others, since beating it made The Odyssey the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, and it’s now the first R-rated release ever to touch $1.7 billion. The next realistic target is Zootopia 2 at $1.867 billion, which sits about $146 million away and, given the film’s unusually gentle weekly declines, isn’t entirely out of reach. Setting aside James Cameron, very few filmmakers are mounting original tentpoles on this scale anymore, and The Odyssey now appears to rank as the third-biggest non-franchise film ever behind only Avatar and Titanic.
Jon Bernthal Is Now in 2026’s Two Biggest Movies
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Universal Pictures -
Universal Pictures
The Odyssey reached $1 billion in three weeks, giving Nolan his first billion-dollar hit since The Dark Knight Rises, and then kept going with notably small weekend drops, an extended IMAX 70mm run that reportedly sold out for seven straight weeks, and a strong China debut in August. Bernthal’s corner of the film is a supporting one, but it’s arguably a memorable piece of the machine. His Menelaus anchors the Sparta material, where Tom Holland’s Telemachus comes searching for news of his missing father, and Bernthal has spoken about the physical commitment the role demanded, including spending the Trojan horse sequence neck-deep in freezing water while other actors stayed dry above him. As he put it to NPR‘s Fresh Air:
“Our grit and our dedication is the one thing that we have control of.”
That he shares his biggest scenes with Holland, then reunited with him months later as the Punisher in the year’s top-grossing film, is the kind of scheduling quirk that makes his 2026 stand out even more. The Odyssey is now the biggest hit of Matt Damon’s, Anne Hathaway’s, and Robert Pattinson’s careers, and the same appears to be true for Bernthal as well, except that he also happens to be in the Spider-Man film sitting one place above it.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
