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In a plot twist worthy of the ancient bards themselves, the hottest movie of the summer isn’t a superhero flick, or an alien-invasion yarn, or a crinolines-and-bonnets period drama. Instead, it is an adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, which film-maker Christopher Nolan is releasing as a follow-up to Oppenheimer, his grim, Oscar-winning study of the origins of nuclear war. Nolan, previously director of Memento, the Dark Knight trilogy and Dunkirk, has now turned his attention to the Odyssey, the classical Greek saga that, along with its companion epic the Iliad, is one of the foundational works of western civilisation.

Nolan’s adaptation is a big-budget affair, the largest of his career at an estimated $250m, and the director has peopled it with a cast ranging from established Hollywood stars such as Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, newer teen-friendly faces including couple of the moment Zendaya and Spider-Man’s Tom Holland, and idiosyncratic choices such as Lupita Nyong’o, Mia Goth, Samantha Morton and fellow director Benny Safdie.

The 24 books of the Odyssey were composed around the eighth century BC and are attributed to the classical Greek poet Homer; acting as a sequel to the Iliad, it tells the story of Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after the conclusion of the siege of Troy. Nolan, 55, explained why he opted to film it, telling the New York Times: “As a film-maker you have to move in impulsive ways. I was looking to challenge myself with a completely different type of storytelling and I was looking for a gap in the culture.”

The contemporary relevance of The Odyssey is a key issue in the film’s potential impact. Mary Beard, professor emerita of classics at Cambridge, says she is hoping for “the Wuthering Heights effect” and suggests there are deeper questions at play behind the surface narrative. “Films always bring people’s attention back to the ancient world and of the whole modern resonance of the classics. What are the big questions raised by the Odyssey and are they still ours? What does it mean to go home? What does war do to those left behind? Where does the boundary between civilisation and barbarity really lie?”

Appropriately for its epic scale, The Odyssey has been entirely shot on the extra-large Imax format (for which Nolan reported he had used 2m ft of film), and, as per his customary practice, Nolan avoided green screen VFX in favour of building authentic props and locations, including the Trojan horse and Odysseus’s ship. In November, he explained his rationale: “By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways. Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

Wendy Mitchell, contributing editor for Screen International, says that Nolan has earned the right to command such expensive and labour-intensive resources. “Nolan gets those huge greenlights for films because he gets huge audiences. I really do think audiences are smart enough to see what’s been done in reality, or in camera, which Nolan is a stickler for, and I know we’re going to feel that on screen as an audience.”

Mitchell adds: “The whole industry really respects his approach to cinema, and shooting on film, in a digital age when we’re going to start to see more shortcuts with AI or tech tools. Nolan is the guy not afraid to do it the old-fashioned way and I think there is a lot of respect for him doing it like that.”

Nolan is not the first mainstream film-maker to look to the classical era for inspiration in recent years. Ridley Scott directed Gladiator II in 2024 to considerable success – following on from the 2000 hit starring Russell Crowe. The Zack Snyder-directed 300, about the battle of Thermopylae, was a huge hit on its release in 2007, as was its 2014 follow-up 300: Rise of an Empire. With box office predictions suggesting The Odyssey could record $80m-$100m on its first weekend in North America alone, the sense is that Nolan could be, like the classical heroes of yore, riding to the rescue of the entire film industry.

The Odyssey arrives at an interesting moment in Hollywood, as big budget superhero movies appear to be running out of steam, and much smaller scale films originating on the internet, from Backrooms to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, are collecting plaudits and box office. Saying that she believes The Odyssey “will see four-quadrant appeal among all kinds of moviegoers”, Mitchell is confident that Nolan will see off the upstarts. “Just because YouTube veterans had cinema hits this year doesn’t mean all of Hollywood is only about YouTube now. What will be more interesting to track is how the Russo brothers’ Doomsday will fare, if the superhero franchises can continue at the level they’ve been at in the past.”

Perhaps inevitably, The Odyssey has also become a victim of the culture war, from Elon Musk and his acolytes accusing Nolan of “want[ing] to destroy western civilisation and everything that helped create it” by casting Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, to critics bemoaning the lack of Greek actors in the film, with Chris Cotonou asking in the Guardian: “Are we unworthy of our myths?”

Nolan has also been criticised for including modern dialogue, chiefly through utilising recent translations by Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn. Beard, however, says there is no harm in that. “Translations are never neutral renderings of the original. We have to remember that there is no one-to-one correspondence between Greek and English: the Greek languages encode the world differently. New translations show us new things, for us, about the texts.” Beard points to Wilson’s rendering of the traditional phrase “serving girls” to the more accurate “slaves”. “That is what in all likelihood they were. It doesn’t undermine the Homeric epics to face the fact that they depicted a slave-owning society.”

Mitchell, meanwhile, says the film will weather any such storms. “I think it’s going to reach everyone. People will want to be in the cultural conversation. It feels like if you care about movies at all, and even if you just see one movie per year, The Odyssey is going to be that movie.”

Hit or myth: classical mythology on screen

Hercules (1997)
There have been dozens of films about the mythical strongman, mostly as a pulpy vehicle for the ripped hunk of the moment. Steve Reeves starred in the 1958 Italian film that kicked off the pulpy sword-and-sandal genre; while still a bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger went to the Big Apple in Hercules in New York in 1970; and Dwayne Johnson played it safe in a 2014 version. But arguably the most memorable is the Disney animation, released in 1997, which didn’t take itself too seriously, either.

Troy (2004)
The Odyssey’s sort-of prequel, a star-stuffed adaptation of Homer’s Iliad by German director Wolfgang Petersen. Brad Pitt plays the unfeasibly handsome tent-sulker Achilles, Orlando Bloom is equally unfeasibly handsome as Paris, and Sean Bean is a gritty Odysseus. But despite the film-makers throwing everything at it, it’s all a bit lifeless.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010)
Greek mythology went YA with the Percy Jackson series of books by Rick Riordan, about the half-human son of undersea god Poseidon, who happens to be living in present-day New York. With Hollywood clearly looking for something to fill in for Harry Potter, a projected series of films was planned with Logan Lerman in the main role. But this first one, in which Percy hunts down Zeus’s missing lightning bolt, never really captured audiences’ imaginations and the series fizzled out after the next one, Sea of Monsters, in 2013.

The Return (2024)
The last significant Odyssey adaptation was a raw, high-minded version originated by the late playwright Edward Bond, starring Ralph Fiennes as a traumatised version of the Greek hero, opposite Juliette Binoche as an enigmatic Penelope. This is a treatment that successfully gets to the heart of the myth’s elemental power.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
We are a long way from sword and sandal territory here. The Coens’ deep-south prison-escape comedy is very loosely inspired by Homer, with George Clooney on extremely dapper form as Ulysses Everett McGill, Holly Hunter as deserted wife Penny, and John Goodman as eyepatch-wearing KKK nasty “Big Dan” Teague.

Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969)
A double header of Greek myth as filtered through Sophocles, Euripedes and Italy’s ramshackle Marxist poet of cinema Pier Paolo Pasolini. The former features an extraordinary smorgasbord of ancient culture costumes, from Sumerians to the Renaissance, while the latter showcases a thunderous performance from opera star Maria Callas.

My Fair Lady (1964)
The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea became, among other things, a George Bernard Shaw play, a hit Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical and an indelible movie classic, in which it doesn’t really matter that elfin star Audrey Hepburn has had her singing voice replaced by Marni Nixon.

Orphée (1950)
French artist and poet Jean Cocteau takes us through the looking-glass for a vision of sex and death unlike anything else in cinema. Bouffant-haired Jean Marais is celebrity poet Orphée, who enters a stripped-down version of hell after his wife dies. The Wachowskis must have watched Cocteau’s amazing mirror special effects before doing the The Matrix.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981)
Stop-motion effects guru Ray Harryhausen became the sine qua non of classical myth movies with this pair of monster-infested tales. The first, starring Todd Armstrong as the fleece-botherer Jason and Nancy Kovack as Medea, was a real step forward in fantasy cinema with its skeleton battle and animated statue. In the second, with an Olympus rather obviously influenced by the recently released Superman, things are looking a tiny bit creaky, but it’s still glorious.