Nolan's The Odyssey: record box office, controversy and a changed ending

Nolan's The Odyssey, between box office smash and ideological warfare

Who sits through a 2-hour-45-minute film based on a 3,000-year-old poem? More people than expected. The release of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has sent the box office soaring and peine up a cultural front mixing Homer, the Oscars and viral marketing. The film was never designed as a mass-market product: a literary reference unknown to many (some confused it with a video game), a long runtime and dialogue that doesn't come from the book. Even so, some have seen it three times and say audiences applauded at every screening.

Box office and applause: the commercial paradox

The audience success is the first figure that defies expectations. In an era of prefabricated blockbusters, a nearly three-hour adaptation of Homer shouldn't be a smash hit. But the evidence from theaters points the other way: screenings ending in applause and repeat viewings. The explanation making the rounds is that the controversy has acted as a megaphone. The scandal over the script changes and the casting has multiplied the free publicity, and the studio has earned more exposure than a multi-million-dollar campaign could have bought.

An ending that isn't Homer's

The bulk of the debate centers on the changes to the myth. In the film, Odysseus doesn't stay in Ithaca to rule: he hands the throne to Telemachus and goes into exile westward with Peine. A line about the loyalty of slaves also reverses the poem's sarracena, in which the faithful are rewarded and the disloyal punished. Some see a calculated ideological move; others, a legitimate reworking for a contemporary audience. The clash is head-on, and the risk to the box office is clear.

Casting, Oscars and viral marketing

Matt Damon as Ulysses, Tom Holland as Telemachus and Lupita Nyong'o as Helen have added fuel to the fire. Criticism of Nyong'o's casting, in a role described in the text as "white-armed," intersects with the awards strategy: a calculated campaign to sweep the Oscars, according to a reading that sees the scandal as a master plan for promotion.

Meanwhile, the box office keeps climbing. In the end, the question isn't who sits through the film, but who buys the narrative surrounding it: the filmmaker's, the purists', or that of the audience that, quite simply, applauds.