Why Nolan’s The Odyssey Is Succeeding When So Many Medieval Fantasy Movies Have Failed
While The Odyssey is fast becoming one of the biggest successes of Christopher Nolan’s multi-decade career, it is easy to work out why this fantasy epic worked when so many big-budget entries into the genre recently fell flat. Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey was, unavoidably, a big risk for the filmmaker. Yes, admittedly, the director of the Dark Knight trilogy is one of the few living directors who could turn a biography of a physicist into a billion-dollar box-office hit, as Nolan did with 2023’s Oppenheimer.
However, while getting Oppenheimer to be Barbie’s main box-office competitor was an impressive achievement, turning the epic Ancient Greek poem The Odyssey into accessible mainstream blockbuster fare was another challenge entirely. Nolan’s movies to date have featured plenty of far-fetched sci-fi concepts, as Interstellar has time dilation, Inception has dream invasion, and The Prestige has (spoilers) human cloning in the Victorian era. However, all of these story elements were always rooted in grounded (albeit theoretical) science, whereas The Odyssey has a cyclops, sirens, and literal gods, and the movie never slows down its storytelling to explain, rationalize, or justify these fantasy elements.
Recent Medieval Fantasy Films Have Been Slain At the Box Office
The reason this marks such a big risk for Nolan is that big-budget fantasy movies have struggled at the box office in recent years, something recently evidenced in the unfortunate box-office failure of the Masters of the Universe reboot. Before that, 2023’s similarly fun Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves proved that not even the shared popularity of Stranger Things 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 could guarantee a D&D movie box-office success.
Notably, both 2026’s Masters of the Universe reboot and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves enjoyed largely positive reviews, albeit nowhere near as glowing as those received by The Odyssey. However, even before the financial failure of these two underrated fantasy flops, epic movies with fantasy elements struggled at the box office for years before the arrival of The Odyssey.
2016’s Biblical epic Ben-Hur cost over $100 million and made less than $95 million, while director Ridley Scott was pushed back into sci-fi when his 2014 Biblical epic Exodus: Gods & Kings cost almost $200 million and made back only $268 million. Outside of Old Testament movies, 2016’s Gods of Egypt cost a whopping $140 million and was a box-office disaster, earning only $140 million upon release.
Nolan Did Fantasy In A Way Mainstream Audiences Can Embrace
Within this context, the box-office success of The Odyssey seems like an almost impossible anomaly. Nolan’s movie might feature plenty of star power in the form of Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, and many more, but some of the movies listed above featured Gerard Butler, Chadwick Boseman, Sigourney Weaver, Chris Pine, Alison Brie, and even Nolan’s own Batman himself, Christian Bale. The real difference comes down to Nolan’s handling of the movie’s fantasy elements.
The Odyssey’s success is owed largely the immersive feel of Nolan’s movie, with the epic adaptation dropping viewers into the world of Nolan’s story for its three-hour runtime and never getting bogged down by exposition or world-building. Like Nolan’s earlier, equally ambitious sci-fi blockbusters, The Odyssey expects viewers to keep up with its fantasy vision instead of over-explaining its lore, and this confidence led the movie to box-office success where its genre competitors struggled.
