‘If you see one movie this year’: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey set to storm the box office
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Christopher Nolan is directing The Odyssey, a $250 million adaptation of Homer's ~3,000-year-old epic poem, his largest-budget film to date and follow-up to Oppenheimer
- The cast spans Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong'o, Mia Goth, Samantha Morton, and fellow director Benny Safdie
- The production was shot entirely on Imax using roughly 2 million feet of film, with Nolan eschewing green-screen VFX in favor of physical builds including the Trojan Horse and Odysseus's ship
- Box office trackers project an $80 million–$100 million opening weekend in North America, positioning the film as a potential rescue for an industry where superhero franchises are cooling and YouTube-origin films are gaining ground
- The film has drawn culture-war fire, with Elon Musk accusing Nolan of wanting to 'destroy western civilisation' by casting Nyong'o as Helen of Troy, while critics in the Guardian questioned the absence of Greek actors
- Nolan used modern translations by Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn for the dialogue; Cambridge classicist Mary Beard defended the choice, noting Wilson's translation renders 'serving girls' as 'slaves,' a more accurate reading
Why it matters: An opening north of $80 million from a non-franchise, non-superhero epic would be the strongest signal yet that audiences still turn out for original big-canvas filmmaking, giving studios ammunition to greenlight costly, non-IP projects; conversely, the Musk-led backlash over casting and the criticism over absent Greek actors show the film is already a proxy battle in the broader culture war before it even opens.
