After The Odyssey, You Won’t Want to Miss This Blockbuster Adaptation Heading to Peacock
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned into the biggest theatrical event of 2026 with an opening week of $264 million. That’s the third-biggest opening of 2026, behind only Toy Story 5 at $159 million and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie at $131 million. Still, given that The Odyssey is R-rated, that opening exceeded every projection. The number surpassed Nolan’s biggest opening weekend to date, The Dark Knight Rises, with $249 million, meaning it’s likely The Odyssey finds its way to the one billion club. Unsurprisingly, The Odyssey‘s massive success has reignited interest in the mythology surrounding the Trojan War, a story so vast that Hollywood has tackled it across two separate blockbusters. While Nolan’s epic covers the journey after the war ends, another major studio adaptation exploring the siege itself is about to become easier to watch.
Troy, the 2004 adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad, is set to stream on Peacock starting August 1st. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, the film chronicles the decade-long siege of Troy, depicting the fall of the walled city after the Trojan prince Paris (Orlando Bloom) takes Helen (Diane Kruger) from her husband, the Spartan king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). The ensemble is led by Achilles (Brad Pitt), the greatest warrior of the Greek forces, alongside Hector (Eric Bana), Troy’s noble defender, Agamemnon (Brian Cox), the ambitious king driving the invasion, and Priam (Peter O’Toole), the aging ruler of Troy.
Troy and The Odyssey Approach the Original Story in Different Manners
Troy and The Odyssey take dramatically different approaches to Homer’s mythology, despite both adapting stories from the same ancient conflict. Petersen’s film strips away nearly every supernatural element from The Iliad, presenting the Trojan War as a political conflict fought entirely by mortals. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, and the rest of the Greek pantheon that shaped the original poem’s events are nowhere to be found, and Achilles’ famous invulnerability is reduced to an arrow to the heel rather than a divine gift. Nolan’s film takes the opposite approach. While The Odyssey also streamlines Homer’s text for pacing, it dedicates substantial screen time to the poem’s fantastical detours, including a towering Cyclops, the witch Circe (Samantha Morton), who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, and the monstrous Scylla. Nolan stops short of fully dramatizing the gods as active characters, but his film still lands considerably closer to Homer’s original vision than Troy ever attempted.
Troy and The Odyssey also diverge sharply in their depiction of the war’s most iconic weapon, the Trojan Horse. Petersen presents the wooden horse as the familiar gift-wrapped trap rolled through Troy’s gates on wheels. The victorious final moments of the siege of Troy come as the movie invites the crowd to cheer for the Greeks’ ingenuity. Nolan instead depicts the Trojan Horse as a claustrophobic trap filled with soldiers enduring gruesome conditions, framing the ploy less as a clever strategy and more as the atrocity that haunts Odysseus (Matt Damon) for the rest of his journey. The two versions reflect almost opposite storytelling philosophies, with Troy favoring the spectacle of Homer’s epic poem and Nolan dwelling in the psychological weight of war.
Not everyone liked Troy‘s take on Homer. The film currently holds just a 53% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers criticizing its loose grip on both history and myth, though it fares considerably better with viewers, holding a 74% audience score built on its scale and entertainment value. That split happens because the film’s blend of large-scale battles and old-Hollywood spectacle has helped it endure as a classic sword-and-sandal epic of the 2000s, one that grossed close to $500 million worldwide against a $175 million budget. Still, despite its flaws, Troy serves as an unexpected companion piece to The Odyssey, as together they cover both parts of Homer’s classic text.
Troy is scheduled to begin streaming on Peacock on August 1.
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