On his first day shooting an emotional scene for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Tom Holland grew increasingly distressed. The director kept cutting, again and again, and the young actor, cast as Telemachus, began to fear his performance was failing. Only later did he learn the interruptions had nothing to do with his craft: the IMAX film cameras, which Nolan is using for the entire feature, can record for just three minutes before the reel runs out. The moment, recounted by Holland in a recent interview, captures the peculiar tension between monumental ambition and mechanical limitation that now runs through the film business.

That tension is playing out in box-office figures across the globe. In North America, the DC superhero film Supergirl collapsed 74 percent in its second weekend, taking just $9.6 million and pushing its global total barely past $100 million against a $170 million production budget. Industry analysts in Los Angeles project losses of at least $100 million, a result that has intensified scrutiny of DC Studios co-head James Gunn’s strategy of introducing secondary characters before core heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman. Meanwhile, the horror film Obsession, shot for $750,000, has sailed past $400 million worldwide, becoming the most profitable release in the history of distributor Focus Features. Its star, Inde Navarrette, previously a supporting player on the television series Superman & Lois, has been catapulted into meetings with directors attached to major Marvel projects, including the forthcoming X-Men reboot.

Animation tells a similarly split story. Illumination’s Minions & Monsters, a prequel set in 1920s Hollywood, opened to $36 million domestically—the lowest debut in the Despicable Me franchise’s history, and well below the studio’s five-day target of $80 million. Yet international markets, particularly in Europe and Africa, lifted its global opening to nearly $160 million, enough to keep the $85 million production on a path to profitability. Toy Story 5, by contrast, held strong in its third week with $31 million, pushing its worldwide total to $764 million and demonstrating the resilience of a franchise many viewers, according to a recent Business Insider survey, believe should have concluded with its third instalment. A surprise entry, the patriotic historical drama Young Washington, capitalised on the US Independence Day weekend to earn $20.8 million and a perfect CinemaScore from audiences, even as critics remained lukewarm.

Viewed from Jakarta, where Minions & Monsters topped the chart despite missing projections, the global picture is one of audiences gravitating toward known quantities while punishing perceived inessential extensions. The same dynamic has left the Wizarding World’s Fantastic Beasts series in limbo and led Lionsgate to abandon the Divergent franchise before its final chapter. In this environment, the meeting between Navarrette and X-Men director Jake Schreier reads less as a routine casting conversation and more as a sign of how quickly a low-budget breakout can redraw the map of who gets to lead a blockbuster. The actor, of Mexican heritage, has also met with Michael Mann and expressed interest in an adaptation of the fantasy novel Fourth Wing, a reminder that the post-Obsession landscape is still taking shape.

Back on the set of The Odyssey, the IMAX camera’s three-minute limit imposed a rhythm of constant resets. It is a fitting image for a summer in which a $170 million superhero film can run out of audience in two weekends, while a $750,000 horror story keeps rolling, reel after reel, long after anyone expected the film to end.