When a high-profile academic review of a film appears in the London Review of Books, and when that review is read and argued over, the film has crossed into genuine cultural phenomenon territory. That is where Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey finds itself this summer. The discourse around it has drawn in everyone from classicists to rightwing commentators, and it has not gone unnoticed by people who simply enjoy watching a movie debate unfold.
Online chatter alone would not prove the film is actually being seen. But The Odyssey has serious box-office receipts. It has already outgrossed Nolan’s own Oppenheimer, itself a surprisingly popular adult drama. The opening weekend audience skewed male, but by the second weekend the gender split was nearly 50/50. The film also brought in older moviegoers, an endangered demographic in a summer where under-25s powered hits like Obsession and Backrooms. Three-quarters of The Odyssey’s audience was over 25.
Meanwhile, the memes have reached younger viewers too. The most popular include Matt Damon’s anguished Odysseus straining to hear the sirens’ song, and Robert Pattinson’s slimy suitor demanding, “someone get these BEGGARS out of here!” The film is now closing in on $1bn worldwide, a mark reached by very few non-franchise, non-animated, adult-oriented movies.
A summer of blockbuster disappointments
Look at the other films aiming for that territory this summer: Supergirl, Masters of the Universe, Moana, Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters. Some bombed, some underperformed, and some became frictionless billion-dollar smashes, but none felt like true cultural events. Even the impending Spider-Man mega-smash, while proving that audiences will still show up for a familiar superhero, underscores how unusual The Odyssey is in a summer that may have seen the tide turn against IP more broadly.
Of course, The Odyssey is itself a kind of IP, a story almost everyone claims to know from school. Nolan’s adaptation has emerged as a towering piece of monoculture, a throwback to the pre-fragmentation era and to the kind of surprise hits like Barbie and Top Gun: Maverick that connected with audiences on a deeper level than predetermined franchises.
Niche hits vs. monoculture
Many 21st-century box-office winners make enormous amounts of money while still appealing to a niche. The Twilight movies reliably earned around $700m worldwide without ever feeling like all-demographics smashes, and plenty of superhero hits have the same quality. A Minecraft Movie was a hit, but it did not exactly unify demographics. The difference is like Avatar, a genuine worldwide phenomenon, versus Avatar 3, a big hit for people who had already seen every Avatar film but not something your grandparents went out to see.
It is tempting to call The Odyssey’s cultural success a pre-internet phenomenon, and in some ways it is, fitting neatly with its connection to the old sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s. But what is happening now is a convergence of old-fashioned monoculture and a more modern discourse explosion. Instead of endless nerd-to-normie translations of superhero lore or glorified spoiler alerts, here is an R-rated movie based on an epic poem, aimed at adults, prompting essays from film critics, academics and amateur Nolan scholars. It is movie discourse fit for a 200-student freshman seminar, writ enormous.
That may sound dismissive. But even though the online versions of these arguments can be tedious, fueled by Nolan’s loudest acolytes and their equally loud detractors, and shadowed by a failed rightwing culture war before release, there is a trackable rationality to a lot of the post-release Odyssey discourse. It is almost like a healthy cultural-studies debate.
The Emily Wilson factor
The most significant academic intervention came from Emily Wilson, the classicist and Odyssey translator whose opening line Nolan has cited as an inspiration for the film. Her London Review of Books piece focused on the director’s deviations from the text, thematic inconsistencies and simplifications, and possible blind spots around race and gender. The review was quickly met with an internet-fueled counter-critique accusing Wilson of misreading certain characters, scenes and ideas.
Some of these exchanges felt like a turf war between classics and film studies. Are academics not allowed to use their own frameworks when analyzing a film? Are film critics not entitled to defend their often less rigorous discipline from those who feel confident swooping in because of the subject matter? The debates reanimated old questions about whether the world’s most successful writer-director gives short shrift to female characters. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope joins the two roles she played for Nolan in The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar as some of the strongest in his filmography. Yet Nolan tends to characterize his female leads as wives or wife figures, and some have argued that the film’s many women are marginalized in ways they are not in the millennia-old source text.
IMAX and the endless discourse machine
The debates have also reached exhibition. The film was shot entirely on IMAX cameras but is being shown in that native format in only a few dozen theaters worldwide. Does that place undue emphasis on an elitist form of spectacle, or is it simply showmanship that makes demand outstrip a deliberately meager supply?
The sheer volume of back-and-forth can be wearying, even for pop-culture writers who make a living off the biggest hits. One film journalist counted at least half a dozen discussion-worthy movies this summer that went unexamined in detail because of middling or low demand, while producing close to a dozen pieces on The Odyssey and Obsession combined. Such a monoculture may simply refine which handful of films gets 90% of the coverage. At least the “ending explained” industrial complex now has endings that might actually bear analysis.
A rare and genuine unifier
What is most striking is that people appear genuinely energized by the discourse, rather than listlessly scrolling. The blend of old-school monoculture and modern digital saturation makes the film and the conversation around it feel nearly as accessible as a streaming series, and probably more rewarding. This is not astroturfing but real post-release excitement, rarer and more fun than pre-release hype. The ginned-up rightwing outrage over the film’s diversity eventually became sporting, as most people realized they do not care what infuriates Elon Musk.
In the end, the movie that a vocal minority swore would bring about the destruction of the west has turned out to be a great unifier, not necessarily of opinion, but as a reminder that going to the movies and talking about them afterward is still a vital part of living in the world.
