Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY has done something no marketing campaign could have planned: it’s sent a new generation racing back to a nearly 2,700-year-old poem.
“It’s always exciting to see beloved classics find new audiences,” Lena Yang, Senior Editor for Audiobooks at Spotify, told Variety. “Audiobooks offer a fresh way to experience timeless tales, and it’s especially rewarding to see listeners returning to ‘The Odyssey’ in such a meaningful way.”
Spotify’s numbers back her up. Listens to Homer’s “The Odyssey” jumped more than 240% in June, weeks ahead of the movie’s July 17 release, then spiked over 500% on opening day itself, with post-premiere listens up 680% compared to before the buzz began.
All told, the platform says listeners have now streamed “The Odyssey” for the equivalent of more than 43 years of continuous playback, spread across 91 audiobook editions in 10 languages. More strikingly for a publisher’s wish list, 36% of those listeners are Gen Z and 45% are Millennials, meaning the bulk of the audiobook’s new fans weren’t assigned it in a high school English class this time around.
Book sales tell the same story. Circana BookScan reported that sales across all print and digital editions of “The Odyssey” are up 76% this year, a jump that lines up neatly with Nolan’s marketing rollout and the movie’s theatrical run.
The movie itself has plenty to do with that rollout. THE ODYSSEY pulled in $263.7 million worldwide in its opening weekend, a career-best for Nolan that topped even THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, according to The Credits, the Motion Picture Association’s editorial outlet. Half the audience was between 18 and 34, and PostTrak surveys found Nolan’s name, not the movie’s starry cast, was the top reason people bought tickets.
That cast is not exactly a footnote, though. Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Robert Pattinson as Antinous and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, whose face famously launched a thousand ships. Nolan and his crew became the first filmmakers to shoot an entire feature on IMAX cameras, filming at sea aboard an actual Viking ship sourced from Norway and hauled through the Mediterranean, the North Sea off Scotland and Iceland’s frigid waters.
Movieguide® has long argued that the best stories, old or new, tend to survive because they tell the truth about the human condition, and Homer’s original is a case study. Odysseus spends 20 years fighting his way home through pride, temptation and monsters mostly of his own making, while Penelope holds a household and a kingdom together through faithfulness nobody could have blamed her for abandoning. Those are not incidental details; they’re the whole point of the poem, and they happen to be values Christian families have been trying to pass down for a lot longer than Spotify has existed.
Movieguide®, however, advises extreme caution when viewing THE ODYSSEY due to “three gratuitous ‘f’ words, brief images of very strong violence, brief occult content and some politically correct content and casting.”
It’s a genuinely encouraging sign when Gen Z, a generation raised on scrolling rather than reading, chooses to spend 43 years’ worth of listening time with a three-millennia-old epic about homecoming and perseverance. Hollywood doesn’t always point people toward something older and truer than itself. This time, thanks to one filmmaker’s stubborn commitment to doing an ancient story justice, it did.
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