Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey feels like a turning-point film: the moment mainstream cinema finally began wiping the slate clean after an era of superhero saturation that continued grotesquely beyond its natural lifespan. More than that, it feels like the end of a punishment.
There is an almost perfect symmetry in the film that has arrived to announce it. In Nolan’s The Odyssey, Odysseus comes to understand the Trojan Horse as the act that broke Zeus’s law: the brilliant military trick that won the war while violating something much older and more fundamental. He constructed an object the Trojans willingly brought through their own gates, concealed an army inside it and destroyed the city from within. Nolan makes the Horse a moral wound whose consequences pursue Odysseus throughout his wandering, connecting it to the ancient Greek principle of xenia, the sacred obligations governing how strangers, guests and hosts treat one another. (Forbes)
Cinema had its own Trojan Horse. It arrived in theatres in 2008 and it was called Iron Man.
There is no need for the revisionism that now treats Iron Man as some immaculate little film unfortunately followed by bad corporate decisions. The rot was already visible. It lowered the standard by teaching Hollywood that glibness could substitute for wit, weightlessness for fun, brand recognition for imagination and a tease for another product for an ending. Its enormous commercial success demonstrated something even more consequential: a movie no longer had to exist principally as a movie. It could function as infrastructure. Nick Fury appearing after the credits was sold as a little thrill, but the industrial lesson underneath it was enormous. The film did not merely have to satisfy the audience sitting in front of it; it could recruit that audience into another film, another character, another property and eventually an entire compulsory viewing network.
The Horse was through the gates, and what followed was an eighteen-year degradation of the blockbuster. Films advertised films that advertised television series that established characters for crossovers that produced further crossovers. Dead characters returned, timelines divided, universes multiplied and endings became administrative inconveniences. Worldbuilding increasingly meant database management. Narrative consequence weakened because everything commercially useful could be reopened, rebooted, reskinned or dragged through a portal from another continuity. Individual films became instalments in a corporate maintenance program.
The deeper problem was never simply that people became tired of superheroes. People became tired of being taken for granted. Studios behaved as though attendance were guaranteed, familiarity were sufficient and previous investment created an obligation to continue. You know these characters. You watched the earlier ones. You understand the references. Therefore you will watch the next one. Eventually the proposition becomes insulting.
Human attention does not behave like server capacity. You cannot keep increasing the volume of a stimulus and assume desire will increase indefinitely alongside it. A 2017 meta-analysis of 268 curve estimates from 81 studies found that repeated exposure and liking followed a pattern consistent with an inverted-U curve: familiarity can initially increase liking before the effect eventually turns downward. Familiarity has a ceiling. Corporate entertainment spent years pretending it did not. (PubMed)
Comic books themselves can sustain extraordinary cycles of reinvention because the form is built for it. Artists change, writers change, continuities are reimagined and characters can pass through radically different visual and narrative interpretations. Industrial blockbuster cinema took that flexibility and converted it into extraction. Avengers: Endgame in 2019 provided an obvious point of conclusion. Major arcs were completed, central characters departed and an enormous interconnected project reached something resembling finality. It was the shore. Hollywood turned around and headed back to sea.
Stories were reopened, alternate versions multiplied, death became negotiable and audiences were increasingly told that keeping up was part of the bargain. Watch this series before that movie. Remember the character from twelve years ago. Learn which universe this one occupies. Stay through the credits because another advertisement will tell you what to anticipate. Keep the subscription active and the continuity current. Cinema became homework. The industry mistook unlimited distribution for unlimited appetite, the same delusion underlying infinite feeds, infinite recommendations, infinite extensions and infinite content. Supply can become effectively endless. Human desire cannot.
There is an additional layer of salt in Christopher Nolan being the filmmaker now kicking down the door, because Nolan had already demonstrated how differently superhero cinema could have developed. Before Batman Begins, he was actually hired by Warner Bros. to direct Troy. Wolfgang Petersen had originally developed the project, temporarily moved toward a proposed Batman vs. Superman film and then reclaimed Troy when that project collapsed. Nolan later recalled that ancient world remaining in the back of his mind, particularly images involving how he wanted to stage the Trojan Horse. Batman Begins screenwriter David S. Goyer has described the Batman assignment that followed as Warner Bros.’ “consolation prize.” (avclub.com)
That accident of history now looks almost absurdly perfect. Nolan was heading toward Troy, was diverted into Batman, spent three films demonstrating how superhero cinema could be handled, finished the story and walked away, and has now finally returned to Troy through The Odyssey.
Batman Begins is roughly where the genre should have stayed in spirit: restrained, cerebral, cinematic and committed to making its absurdities answer to some recognisable physical reality. Nolan explicitly described his intention as telling a superhero story realistically and building Batman inside a recognisable contemporary world. The cape did not grant the film permission to become weightless. The material was treated with the architecture and seriousness of crime cinema, thrillers and large-scale action filmmaking. There was no constant tonal panic requiring every sincere moment to be punctured by a joke, no rubber-band CGI bodies ricocheting around an indeterminate digital space, no assumption that comic-book material required audiences to lower the standards they applied to every other kind of film. (Forbes)
Then Nolan did something even more alien to the franchise era: he stopped. In 2012 he said Batman could theoretically continue forever, but once he had told the story he had set out to tell, continuing would not be the right thing to do. His trilogy had acquired a beginning, middle and end, and he allowed the end to remain an end. (ABC News) Warner Bros. obviously owned a character capable of generating films indefinitely. Nolan understood that commercial repeatability and narrative necessity are not the same thing.
He did not spend the following fourteen years directing The Dark Knight 4, Joker Origins, Young Alfred, The Gotham Initiative, Batman: Multiverse War and a streaming series explaining where Lucius Fox bought the fucking Batmobile tyres. He finished the trilogy and made Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer and eventually Homer.
And here the symmetry becomes almost indecent.
Odysseus has been absent from Ithaca for twenty years when Nolan’s story reaches its homecoming: ten years consumed by the Trojan War and another ten trying to return. (Forbes) Twenty years before The Odyssey arrived in 2026, Marvel hired Jon Favreau to direct Iron Man in April 2006 and began assembling the film that would become the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Principal photography would come later, but 2006 is a legitimate industrial starting point for what followed. (Wikipedia)
2006 to 2026. Twenty years.
The superhero system itself occupied theatres for eighteen of them, from Iron Man’s release in 2008 to The Odyssey in 2026, but the machinery that produced it began turning twenty years ago. Odysseus disappeared into Troy and the long punishment of his return. Mainstream cinema disappeared into its own enormous machine. Now Nolan, the filmmaker who was originally supposed to make Troy before being diverted into Batman Begins, has finally arrived back in that ancient world at almost precisely the other end of the cycle.
The circle closes.
There could scarcely be a more satisfying filmmaker to do it. Nolan entered superhero cinema before saturation, treated the genre with restraint, physicality and seriousness, made three films instead of thirty and left when his story was finished. The industry then took the opposite lesson from superhero success, enlarged the machinery until the machinery became the product and spent two decades discovering the limits of audience endurance. Now the man who once tried to make the cape answer to cinema has returned without the cape at all, carrying Homer behind him like a battering ram.
A filmmaker who once demonstrated how seriously comic-book material could be taken has emerged from the far end of its industrial exhaustion with a gigantic adaptation of one of the foundational stories of Western literature. There is no Phase Seven. There is no homework. There is no post-credits roadmap demanding that the audience reserve emotional space for the next eleven products. There is a story, a filmmaker and a cinema screen.
That is why The Odyssey arriving now feels so beautifully appropriate. A story about a man finally reaching home after twenty years of war, wandering and punishment has become the film making mainstream cinema feel as though it might finally be finding its way home too.
Nolan has taken an epic whose origins reach back roughly three thousand years, mounted it as an R-rated film running two hours and fifty-two minutes and shot every frame with IMAX film cameras, the first feature ever photographed entirely that way. Universal spent approximately US$250 million making it. Audiences responded with a US$264.1 million worldwide opening, the largest global debut of Nolan’s career. It achieved that while being neither a modern cinematic-universe instalment nor a sequel and without requiring viewers to prepare by consuming a stack of related products. (IMAX)
The lesson should be painfully obvious: make films that are authored, ambitious and complete. Make spectacle consequential. Allow endings to remain endings. Give people something that exists because somebody desperately wanted to make it rather than because an intellectual-property department discovered an unused quarter on a release calendar.
The Odyssey did not break the door alone. Other films had already started swinging the battering ram.
Obsession struck first. Curry Barker made his twisted romantic horror film for approximately US$750,000. Two months into its theatrical run it had crossed US$400 million worldwide, reaching approximately US$403 million by early July. A film made for considerably less than many studio productions spend on reshoots became one of the year’s commercial phenomena. It demolished the proposition that astronomical expenditure or an intellectual property inherited from somebody else is necessary for mass appeal. (Variety Australia)
Then Backrooms hit the door again. Kane Parsons developed his cinematic language through online filmmaking while extraordinarily young, took an internet-born horror phenomenon and made something recognisably his own, and A24 entrusted him with a feature budgeted at approximately US$10 million. Within ten days it had passed US$200 million worldwide and become A24’s highest-grossing global release; its worldwide total now stands at roughly US$387 million. (Variety Australia)
Put the three together: a US$750,000 film by Curry Barker, a US$10 million A24 production directed by a filmmaker who emerged through YouTube, and Christopher Nolan spending roughly US$250 million adapting Homer. They could scarcely be further apart in scale, history or form, yet they reveal the same hunger. Audiences want filmmakers with identities. They want ideas, discovery and experiences. They want to enter a cinema without feeling as though they are renewing a subscription to something that should have died years ago.
Obsession battered the door once, Backrooms battered it again and The Odyssey knocked the fucking thing down.
Its particular importance is that it demonstrates the principle at the absolute upper limit of mainstream filmmaking. Nolan has been entrusted with a quarter of a billion dollars and used it to make The Odyssey. There is no interconnected universe required to rationalise the expenditure. Homer supplies the foundation, Nolan supplies the authorship and the film itself supplies the reason to attend.
One of the oldest surviving stories in Western literature has consequently become a rebuke to Hollywood’s understanding of familiarity. The franchise system assumed familiarity meant repeatedly presenting the same trademarks until the audience surrendered. Homer demonstrates another kind of familiarity: stories remaining alive because successive generations continue recognising themselves inside them. Odysseus has survived for millennia because home, absence, temptation, violence, cunning, grief, guilt, identity and return remain human material. A story can be ancient without being exhausted. A franchise can be eighteen years old and feel embalmed. Age was never the problem. Repetition without renewal was.
The Trojan Horse therefore becomes an almost obscenely neat metaphor for the entire era. Hollywood discovered an ingenious device in Iron Man: interconnected superhero filmmaking. It worked commercially, so the industry copied the mechanism, expanded it and eventually built its entire conception of blockbuster cinema around it. The trick became doctrine, doctrine became infrastructure, infrastructure became saturation and saturation became punishment. For eighteen theatrical years the Horse kept disgorging soldiers: universes, phases, cameos, legacy characters, multiverses, resurrections, reboots and corporate presentations announcing what audiences would supposedly be excited about five years from now before anybody had provided sufficient reason to care about Friday.
Our torment became abundance without discovery.
Nolan also understands something the saturation model forgot about theatrical cinema: the cinema itself should provide an experience worth seeking out. The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, and the scarcity of 70mm IMAX presentations has prompted people to travel extraordinary distances, with some venues scheduling screenings as early as 2 a.m. to accommodate demand. (IMAX Corporation) The audience is making unusual efforts to see the film because the filmmaker made unusual efforts to create something specifically for that environment.
None of this argues that every filmmaker requires Nolan’s resources. Obsession destroys that claim immediately. Spend US$750,000 when that is what the idea requires, US$10 million when that is what it requires or US$250 million when that is what it requires. Money is a means. It cannot be the idea. The common factor is conviction.
I gave The Odyssey an 8/10. I have problems with it, particularly some editing choices toward the end, but its historical significance may ultimately exceed its individual imperfections. It feels like a declaration that blockbuster filmmaking can move forward through decisive authorship, elemental storytelling and genuine theatrical ambition instead of further expansion of corporate continuity charts.
I would not be surprised to see it eventually earn somewhere between one and two billion dollars worldwide. That remains speculation, obviously, but a US$264.1 million opening for an R-rated, nearly three-hour Homer adaptation already demonstrates the scale of the appetite. People came because they were excited to see the film itself.
Hollywood spent years confusing recognition with desire. It assumed that because audiences knew something they wanted more of it, because they had once cared about characters they would continue caring indefinitely and because they had invested years they could be relied upon forever. It mistook familiarity for love, investment for obligation and saturation for permanence. It forgot that audiences can simply leave.
Nolan had already shown the industry another path immediately before this whole machine began: take genre seriously, restrain its excesses, make the strongest films you can, give actions consequences and stop when the story is finished. Batman Begins could accommodate a billionaire dressed as a bat without surrendering itself to rubber-band spectacle and compulsory quipping. The Dark Knight trilogy could become enormously successful without being required to reproduce forever. Nolan closed it, walked away and spent fourteen years elsewhere.
Then, twenty years after Marvel began assembling Iron Man, he finally returned to the ancient world Warner Bros. had originally hired him to enter before Batman existed in his career at all. Odysseus was gone for twenty years. In the metaphor, so was cinema. The detour began with Nolan being taken away from Troy and sent to Gotham; it ends with Nolan leaving the exhausted cape era behind and finally walking through Troy’s gates.
Obsession struck the door. Backrooms struck it again. The Odyssey knocked it down, and there is something exquisitely appropriate about Christopher Nolan being the one standing on the other side.
Our capeshit punishment is finally over. Let the dead franchises lie where they fell and the capes and corporate debris gather dust behind us. Trust filmmakers and audiences. Let strange films become enormous. Let tiny films explode. Let huge films justify being huge. Let somebody with a camera and an idea become the next person entrusted with a cinema screen. Let ancient stories return in forms nobody expected and new stories arrive without first proving that somebody owned the trademark in 1987.
The human mind cannot be saturated into permanent obedience. Eventually we reject what we are force-fed, hunger for discovery again and find our way home.
After twenty years, Odysseus has returned.
So has cinema.
A turning-point film.
