Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the biggest thing since sliced bread. Actually, I don’t know how to quantify that… do we still attribute revenue to the slice as a differentiator? Or is it tablestakes at this point? As a consumer, an uncut loaf feels more luxurious to me, but that’s a train of thought for another day. Today’s musing is all about how a story that is multiple millennia old became the hottest thing happening in the world today. The sword and sandals tale racked up an impressive $264.1 million at the worldwide box office in its opening weekend. $52 million of that, or just about 20 percent, came from IMAX ticket sales. And that right there is the rub.
It would be easy to say Nolan is a hitmaker (he is) and that the whole world responds to grand spectacle (it does), but what is also undeniably true is that that audience was not only willing to pay a premium for craft, but willing to go out of the way to do so. There are more than 200,000 theatrical screens in the world. About 1,900 of those screens are IMAX. Of those, about 40 can project IMAX 70 millimeter film. Listen, I’m not a mathematician, but I’m willing to bet one of those Trojan Horse popcorn buckets that this is a statistically significant number of folks seeking out a statistically minuscule number of theaters to revel in the practical, human art that Nolan put on display here.
Now I am on the record as something of a Nolan detractor. I loved The Dark Knight with my whole being, but his compulsion to fuss with the timelines of stories irritates me. That Oppenheimer was deemed the cinematic event of the year while riding on Barbie’s coattails made me apopleptic. I think Inception is a marvel and I also think that we have been waiting since Inception to see something as immense and ambitious from him. In sifting through the dust of the centuries to tell one of humanity’s greatest stories in an extremely handcrafted way, he’s finally done it. Everything that sings on that big, vast screen is powered by the small details of people doing what they do best. The effects are practical, the medium is tangible and finite. They reached for ancient instruments and developed mirror systems for the actors, all practical tasks achieved through extreme effort. And why? For innovation. The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely in IMAX. At every turn, Nolan chose human art over machine precision and in so doing rendered an intimate epic. A cinematic marvel that feels as though it were sold by the singers and poets over a fire.
In other words, Nolan understood three things that helped The Odyssey hit critical mass:
What’s Old Is New Again
After decades of superhero mania dominating the summer blockbuster calendar,, stories that still hit the hero journey circle but eschew the zap bam trimmings of Marvel and DC have done well in recent years. (What was that I was saying about Barbie?). The Odyssey ticks all the boxes. It is familiar. Quite literally. The archetypes we use in branding are ripped from these stories. Elements of the tale itself are common parts of our language, so ubiquitous that they even inform major brand names. So we might not all be scholars of the classics, but we all kinda know Odysseus’ deal. Then there’s the fact that these types of epics have been box office gold throughout all of Hollywood history, but had a particular little peak in the early 2000s when Gladiator, Troy and 300 all had their day in the sun. Nostalgia marketing is having a moment, as we all seem inclined to take comfort in the familiar. Nolan knows he doesn’t have to sell us on the concept. He’s telling one of the most famous stories ever written.
Handmade Carries Cachet
Even as Nolan is tapping into the storied history of Odysseus and his pals, he seems to be reckoning with his own role in the underwhelming tentpoles of blockbuster cinema today. His work in the superhero genre coincided with a rise in prestigious cloaked crusader stories that eventually gave way to the increasingly flat and formulaic slop that dominates the summer release calendar today. His innovations launched a thousand imitators. And he himself went down a path of tech-forward storytelling that seems to have disconnected him (for a time) from the personal side of his work. In Oppenheimer he painted the story of a man who became his own undoing through innovation. In The Odyssey, he follows a man who ruined the world and his culture as he knew it based on his schemes and wanderings. There can be little coincidence in his approach to telling this story. At every turn, he chose practical effects. He elected to make textured, human art. He chose imperfections and character and the grain of film over the polished sheen of digital. It’s a return to craft that feels like a powerful statement of what humans are capable of, and will always do better than algorithms. As marketers, we’re all in an era of defining our value. And human perspective is the place to start.
You Have to Have a Point of View
The Odyssey looks at Odysseus as much more than a hero of legend. Where it could merely celebrate his cleverness, it asks why he needs it in the first place. Nolan gives Penelope anger not just longing and Telemachus a deep feeling of uncertainty rather than rote admiration for his father. To achieve this he makes character and story choices, including bringing a character from the Aneid, Sinot, into a focal point of the tale. Sinot is not just the soldier who convinces the Trojans to accept a gift, he’s a young man who shouldn’t have been there at all. Odysseus knows this, knows that wealthy Antinous forced the circumstances to send Sinot and spare himself and comes to wear his failure to stop it as a badge of failure. In this, and other choices, Nolan puts his stamp on the story. Painting Odysseus as a cautionary tale and lingering over the details of the ruin that becomes his legacy reveals the thought and intention that guided a vision that’s captivating audiences. If Nolan chose a sleek, shiny narrative built on CGI and big audience moments would it be dominating the discourse?