Early bets on the 2027 Oscars are in, and one film is by far and away the frontrunner to take home the Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s only been about a month since the 2026 Oscars aired in March after a lengthy awards season, but that hasn’t stopped people from making predictions on which films will dominate the 99th Academy Awards. Thus far this year, we’ve had notable box office hits including Project Hail Mary and critically acclaimed films such as The Sound of Falling, and a handful of other movies slated to release within the next few months will likely join them, particularly Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and The Devil Wears Prada 2. But one summer blockbuster is expected to be the Oscar bait of the season.
The Odyssey is the clear early favorite for next year’s Best Picture Oscar
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is already in the lead for the 2027 Best Picture Oscar, according to a bet on the Kalshi prediction market (as of April 15). The full results of the market reveal how impressively large of a lead the movie has over the rest of the competition.
- The Odyssey – 31%
- Project Hail Mary – 12%
- Wild Horse Nine – 10%
- Digger – 8%
- Dune: Part Three – 7%
- Disclosure Day – 5%
- The Social Reckoning – 5%
- 1949 / Fatherland – 5%
- Fjord – 4%
- Artificial – 3%
- Michael – 3%
- The Adventures of Cliff Booth – 2%
So, at the time of writing, The Odyssey has a 19-point margin over Project Hail Mary and a 20-point lead or more over every other film. This includes movies that only received 1% or less of the vote, such as Sense and Sensibility, Behemoth, Cry to Heaven, Ink, Josephine, The Death of Robin Hood, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, Avenger’s Doomsday, and Werwulf.
Delving into the history of the bet, which started on March 20, The Odyssey started with 17% of the vote and that has only increased to its current dominance in the field.
A separate bet on Kalshi that asks about which films will be nominated for the 2027 Best Picture Oscar has The Odyssey in the lead as well with 89% of the vote. Some of the movies included in this market, like Parallel Tales, The Drama, Being Heumann, and Saturn Return, are not available as options in the aforementioned bet, but their inclusion would likely not have changed the results much.
That said, these are very early predictions and these bets can change on a dime if The Odyssey fails to live up to the hype or if another film begins winning best feature film awards near the end of year.
Directed and written by Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey is a fantasy adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek classic and features a star-studded cast led by Matt Damon as Odysseus. The story follows the epic journey of the Greek king of Ithaca as he races home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Aided by Athena (Zendaya), the goddess of wisdom and warfare, Odysseus will confront the witch Circe (Charlize Theron), the cyclops Polyphemus, and sirens of the sea, while Penelope attempts to deny her many suitors such as Antinous (Robert Pattinson) in her husband’s absence. Naming the rest of the ensemble cast is an embarrassment of riches that includes Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong’o, and John Leguizamo.
The production budget for The Odyssey is massive at $250 million, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter, which means that the film will need to cross the lofty $625 million barrier just to break even. But Universal Pictures and Syncopy, the production company owned by Nolan and producer Emma Thomas, are taking the gamble with the hope that it will be a box office smash that also cleans up at the Oscars, much like The Gladiator did in 2000.
