When UC Berkeley launched a seven-session online book club around Homer's Odyssey ahead of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation, organizers expected a modest turnout. Instead, more than 1,300 people from around the world signed up — most of them with no background in classical studies. In April, 55 students and staff held a "Homerathon" on campus, reading the entire epic aloud over twelve hours. None of this happened after the film came out. All of it happened before a single ticket was sold.
The Odyssey opens July 17, with a $250 million budget — Nolan's most expensive film to date. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, and Zendaya takes on Athena, with Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Lupita Nyong'o rounding out the cast. The script is described as faithful to Homer's text, though Nolan has adapted it in his characteristically non-linear fashion. The connection between Nolan and this material runs deeper than most realize: he was once in line to direct Troy (2004), adapted from Homer's other epic, the Iliad. Wolfgang Petersen took the job instead, and Nolan went on to make Batman Begins. He has said he wasn't ready then. Twenty years later, he is.
The response from the academic world has been concrete. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles staged a full day of Odyssey-themed events in late May. An Australian bookseller organized a month of lectures timed to culminate in a Melbourne screening. The Classical Association in the UK refocused its regional book clubs around Homer. Cambridge University Press timed the publication of a new scholarly edition of Book XI — the underworld descent — to coincide with the film's release. Cambridge Professor Richard Hunter hopes the film will be "teeming with women" and do justice to the underworld scene; his colleague Rebecca Laemmle has welcomed Zendaya's casting as Athena, hoping Nolan won't shy away from the gods and mythological elements that recent Homer adaptations have avoided.
Yet the Christian Science Monitor has noted the paradox: the same week The Odyssey is generating unprecedented public interest in Homer, universities across the country are cutting classical studies courses. And unlike Oppenheimer, which had a ready-made biography for audiences to pick up on the way out of the theater, the Odyssey is a 3,000-year-old epic poem with a significantly higher entry barrier. Whether cinematic excitement translates into actual reading is genuinely uncertain.
