The Odyssey: How Christopher Nolan Turned Homer Into a Summer Blockbuster

Christopher Nolan has somehow turned a story that is nearly 3,000 years old into one of the biggest pop culture events of the summer. Even more impressively, he has convinced millions of people to spend almost three hours watching Matt Damon desperately try to get home.

The Odyssey is not the kind of movie you casually fit between dinner and drinks. At 172 minutes, it is the evening. And for most of those 172 minutes, Nolan does not exactly allow you to relax. There are battles, storms, monsters, shipwrecks, revenge, temptation, death and gods making life significantly more complicated than it already is. By the time Odysseus reaches another island, you begin to understand why getting from Troy back to Ithaca took him ten years.

It is intense. Almost aggressively so. But it works.

The story, of course, comes from Homer. After fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus, king of Ithaca, begins the journey home to his wife Penelope and their son Telemachus. What should be a return trip becomes one of literature’s most famous adventures. Nolan keeps the basic mythology but gives it the kind of enormous physical scale that makes complete sense for a director who apparently looked at Oppenheimer and decided his next project needed more sea, more sand and considerably more danger.

And then there is Matt Damon.

Damon plays Odysseus exactly as this version of the story needs him to. He is clever and commanding, but also exhausted, dirty, wounded and increasingly worn down by everything that happens to him. There is very little polished Hollywood heroism here. He looks like someone who has spent years fighting wars and arguing with the universe.

It is a great performance precisely because Damon does not make Odysseus too heroic. He can be strategic, arrogant, charming, violent, vulnerable and occasionally very bad at making his own life easier. Damon has spent decades playing men who have to survive impossible situations, from Jason Bourne to The Martian, so perhaps we should have known that sending him into Homer would work this well. Critics were similarly enthusiastic, with early reactions describing the performance as among the strongest of his career.

Waiting for him in Ithaca is Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and she brings a completely different energy to the film. While Odysseus is crossing seas and fighting for his life, Penelope has her own problem at home: a palace full of men who have decided her husband is probably dead and one of them should therefore become her next husband.

Hathaway plays her with control rather than melodrama. Penelope watches, understands and calculates. She does not need a sword or a storm to hold attention. There is something satisfying about seeing Hathaway back in Nolan’s world after The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, particularly because she knows exactly how to work inside his very large cinematic machinery without becoming lost in it. Critical reaction has also singled out her performance, particularly the intelligence and self possession she gives Penelope.

Of course, Nolan did not exactly struggle to find actors for this project. Tom Holland plays Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope’s son. Zendaya is Athena. Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth, John Leguizamo and Samantha Morton are all somewhere in this very crowded ancient world. It is one of those casts where you stop being surprised when another famous face appears.

Still, Robert Pattinson manages to make himself impossible to ignore.

Pattinson plays Antinous, the most dangerous and unpleasant of Penelope’s suitors, and he seems to be having a very good time being terrible. There is arrogance, menace and just enough charm to make the character more interesting than the standard villain standing between the hero and his home.

Pattinson has become particularly good at this kind of thing. He can enter a film, slightly distort its energy and suddenly become the person you are watching even when he is surrounded by some of the most famous actors in Hollywood. That happens here too. The first reactions to the movie repeatedly singled him out, with more than one critic essentially reaching the same conclusion: Pattinson steals scenes.

The scale around all these performances is, naturally, very Nolan. The Odyssey reportedly cost around $250 million, was filmed across six countries and was shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. There are vast landscapes, enormous ships, violent seas and battle sequences designed for the biggest screen you can find.

But what makes the nearly three hour runtime manageable is not simply that everything looks expensive. The film rarely releases the pressure. Nolan moves from one ordeal to another with very little interest in giving either Odysseus or the audience a comfortable break. At certain points you become tired for him. And perhaps that is exactly the point. This is a story about trying to get home while absolutely everything seems determined to prevent it. Apparently, audiences were willing to suffer with him.

By August 10, The Odyssey had passed $1.1 billion worldwide, making it Nolan’s highest grossing film ever without adjusting for inflation. It overtook The Dark Knight Rises and became the highest grossing domestic IMAX release in history. Even more interestingly, the $1.1 billion figure came before the film had opened in China, one of its final major markets.

Which brings us to another very Christopher Nolan part of the story: how much money Christopher Nolan makes when Christopher Nolan makes a billion dollar movie.

The exact figure is private, but industry estimates suggest Nolan earns a major share of the box office through a profit participation deal, plus an upfront fee from Universal. With The Odyssey already passing the billion-dollar mark, his total payout is expected to be well into nine figures.

A $250 million Homer adaptation starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Zendaya crossing a billion dollars might sound surprising on paper—but somehow it isn’t.

That may be Nolan’s strangest achievement at this point. A 172-minute ancient Greek epic shot for IMAX no longer feels risky.

It just feels like a Christopher Nolan summer movie.