Nolan's 'Odyssey' draws IMAX pilgrims and Greek-learners as a leaked copy surfaces on X

Box office and the IMAX pilgrimage

Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' has taken $640m at the global box office after nine days, with $87m in the US on its second weekend, a 30% drop from its opening frame. The film is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70-millimeter film, and demand for that format is driving extraordinary behaviour. At New York's AMC Lincoln Square, home to the largest IMAX screen in the United States, the theatre added 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. screenings to meet demand; roughly 450 people turned up for the 2 a.m. Sunday slot. Ellis Tan, a photographer from Westchester County, called it "definitely an event". Student Dash Suarez attended with five pajama-clad friends and said, "I don't think there's a compromise in any section of his storytelling." Amanda Quinonez, who sat in a front-row seat, had read the original poem "too many times" but could not recall which translation she first encountered in her Texas high school.

A leaked copy spreads on X

A high-quality pirated version of the near-three-hour film was posted on X at the weekend. An account flagged the upload with the message "Someone uploaded 'The Odyssey' full movie on X. Can you believe it?" That post was viewed more than 3m times before the account hosting the film was suspended. Film industry outlet Variety reported that an embedded message gathered 2.1 million views in two-and-a-half hours on Saturday. Universal issued a statement: "We became aware of the unauthorized posting of the film and immediately initiated takedown protocols. We take copyright infringement seriously and will pursue all appropriate remedies to protect our content and intellectual property rights." The leak does not appear to have dented the picture's momentum; its second-weekend hold of minus-30% is regarded as a sign of staying power in the world's largest cinema market by revenue. Elon Musk, the owner of X, had been a vocal critic of the film's casting choices and said last week he would use his AI platform Grok Imagine to produce a "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer's poem.

The Circe debate

Critics have taken aim at Nolan's portrayal of Circe, played by Samantha Morton. In Homer's text Circe is a goddess who lives in a palace of "polished stones, on high foundations" and transforms men with a potion and a wand. Emily Wilson's 2017 translation, the first by a woman into English, depicts her as a character as wily as the hero and more knowledgeable. Nolan's version turns the encounter into a body-horror set piece in which Circe stretches and moulds the soldiers' heads like putty, sticking her hands into their mouths to shape their faces into pig snouts. The New York Times described the portrayal as "a particularly disheartening disservice to one of the earliest examples of a powerful, sexually autonomous woman in literature". In the poem Odysseus becomes so enamoured of her that she functions as a kind of substitute wife; the film casts her as cruel and crazed, her violence presented as unwarranted.

I had to exclude some of that material. But I didn't want to completely take it off the table in terms of what it is saying about men and the way they wage war.

The Greek-language surge

Google Trends data shows searches in the UK for "learn Greek" have risen by 5,000 per cent over the past fortnight. A language trends expert for Preply, Madeline Enos, credited the film with creating a spark that "can lead to a deeper understanding of Greece's linguistic and cultural heritage". She noted that Homer's Odyssey was composed in ancient Greek, which differs significantly from the modern language, and that ancient Greek offers a closer engagement with the original text while modern Greek connects learners to contemporary culture. Sales of published copies of the poem have risen 70% year on year, with 35,000 more copies sold in Britain in 2026 versus roughly 5,000 in 2025. Scholars had already criticised production details before release, including the male characters wearing trousers instead of skirts and the use of "dad" rather than "father". The finished film has split purists, with some accepting Nolan's artistic licence.

Five hidden details fans are spotting

On re-watch, fans have catalogued several blink-and-you-miss-it moments. Inside the Trojan horse a soldier tries to flee when the crowd outside chants for it to be set alight; a Trojan leader slices his sword through the wooden flank and nicks a soldier's shoulder, but another hiding soldier quickly wipes the blood off the blade as it is withdrawn, preserving the ambush. When Odysseus climbs down from the horse's stomach, he is seen limping, a nod to the cramp of prolonged confinement. In the Hades sequence, the soldier Polites cracks when he spots Elpinor among the army of the unburied dead, the comrade whose body was left behind in the Cyclops' cave and whose ring recurs throughout the film. In the closing scene, as Odysseus explains his guilt to Penelope while disguised as a beggar, the goddess Athena appears beside him, a wistful presence watching his confession.

Reader verdicts

Guardian readers sent mixed reactions. Samiul Kamal-Uddin, 49, from London, praised the technical scale and Imax soundscape but found the film "not as profound as it wanted to be" and was distracted by the starry cast: "Matt Damon, especially in the island scenes, reminded me of his early Bourne performances." Carmen from St Louis found it "a poignant and painful story of a man who has to reckon with all the death and destruction he was personally responsible for". A reader in Greece called it "a very American version with little connection to Homer's creation", noting that every Greek pupil studies the poem as a separate subject in the first year of middle school. Nolan told Time he wrote an alternative ending because Homer's original "is so grim and so misogynistic". The film is now among the best-reviewed of his career.