Can The Odyssey (2026) bring it back?
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of decades or so there’s a few things you ought to know. Firstly, unless you have like, serious rock-mould on your walls or something, you might want to look at renewing your lease because we’re kind of going through a housing / affordability / general everything crisis out here. Secondly, video rental stores are gone. Yes it’s a shame—there is this thing called “streaming” now and no one really likes it but that’s a conversation for another time. Thirdly, acclaimed director Christopher Nolan adapted Homer’s Odyssey into a film and it’s really good, but you can only see it as it was truly intended in like 3 cinemas in all of the UK, so people are buying tickets to go to 4am showings weeks from now. Yes that is the guy who did The Dark Knight. Yes people still talk about The Dark Knight.
Now, I know that if I was that guy who emerged from my rock-home and heard all that I’d probably be like “wow, that all sounds crazy for better and for worse, honesty not surprised about the video rental stores thing though”, and that’s something that I’m going to come back to, but first I have to talk about the TheOdyssey (2026) debacle currently unfolding, because I feel deeply in my bones that they’re related on a philosophical level, and it all comes down to one word: inconvenience. Or, to put it more aptly, the virtues of inconvenience.
So why are people buying tickets to go see a three hour long movie at 4am weeks after it’s already released? To put it simply, it’s marketing, albeit with an eye towards artistic presentation. Much has been made ado about how the film itself was shot and how it’s intended to be screened, and it’s culminated in something of a pop-culture event which is burning brighter than the non-technically focussed discussions of the film (of which there are still plenty, on both side of the political spectrum). The main take-away is that the film was shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, which are very big, very loud, and record a square-ish, very high quality image onto big reels of celluloid film. The purpose of it being more square-ish than rectangular is to give the impression that the moving image on the screen in your chosen cinema[1] completely dominates your field of view and envelops you in the image. The extra screen room isn’t really there to provide critical visual information, but just to fill the periphery. Because of this (and the huge expense of filming on IMAX cameras) previous filmmakers have opted to shoot the majority of their films more traditionally, and employ the weapon of IMAX when going for the big action beats. In The Odyssey, Nolan has made the decision to shoot the entire feature film back to front with these cameras; the first director to ever do so.
So, now the interested film goer has a conundrum. Do they pay the premium to go see the film how it was actually shot? Or do they go to their local cinema to see a version which, though complete, is technically cropped to fit into a rectangle?[2] Also, if you add to that the fact that the film is distributed in both a digital format, and also in physical 70mm and 35mm film stock for the cinemas that can project them, the list of theatres that can show the film in all of its intended film-grainy glory are far fewer and farther between than there is demand for.[3] Maybe if the film in this case was something other than what it is, the demand wouldn’t be as overwhelming. If, for example, The Devil Wears Prada 2[4] happened to be shot entirely on IMAX cameras and distributed on reels of physical film to select theatres, I don’t think there’d be as much of a fuss made about it, but I suppose that was never going to be that way, because only someone who loves the process and the art of filmmaking would go to the effort, and it stands to reason that only fans of this person’s work would be willing to go the distance to see it.
And despite this, those select showings are booked out for weeks all across the UK and the rest of the world. Here in Ireland (where we unfortunately have no 70mm IMAX theatres) the best I could get was regular digital IMAX, and even on a Monday afternoon it was so packed that I was only 5 rows from the front. The 35mm and 70mm print showings in the Irish Film Institute are sold out for the next two weekends. The film itself is on a healthy track to break the 1 billion USD mark globally. The marketing worked. The word is out there: “You have to go see The Odyssey, but you have to go and see it in IMAX”.
Ok, so, big movie makes big money. Is that my point here? Not really. The new Spider-man film, Spider-man Brand New Day (2026) opens this coming weekend and it’s going to make big money too. Even bigger money if pre-sale forecasts are correct. My point is more along the lines that The Odyssey is making big money in the most inconvenient way possible, and I don’t think it’s a one off freak of nature type deal. We’re being sold this line that the experience writ large is worth the inconvenience, and honestly, it kind of really is. The long, difficult journey[5] it will be for many to see this film in the way that it’s best experienced will undoubtedly add to the general aura, the mythos, if you will, of the film. Love it or hate it, people will talk about it and want to talk about it, and that’s what matters. Put frankly, seeing this film “properly” is kind of a pain in the ass, but I think that adds a lot to it, and I’m glad that it is. Too many blockbuster movies are so forgettable, and not enough big movies care enough about the art and the craft of film making to sweep up this kind of support or this discussion, and I care about that. If the “Barbenheimer” event of a couple years back proved anything, it’s that people like movies most when movies are more than just movies, and I do too.
And reflecting on that lately brought up some long-forgotten feelings, some sensememories of a particular place that I loved when I was growing up that doesn’t exist anymore: the late Irish video rental store, Xtra-vision. Now, much has been written lamenting the death of these institutions[6], and I’d hardy be the first to write about the giddy excitement of going to one of these places on a Friday evening to pick up your weekend’s entertainment, but I’m going to anyway because God, people growing up now—those weaned on the media diet of streaming—have no idea just how good it was, despite it being so much less convenient.
To start, the simple fact that my family was seemingly perpetually in micro-debt to our biweekly entertainment provider is, in hindsight, kind of absurd. The fact that every other weekend our interaction with the poor teenaged clerk was marked by the awkward “so there’s actually a late charge on your account” exchange is funny to look back on, but the fact that every other patron was in the same boat says a lot about why those businesses haven’t really stuck around. And then, after the fun of Friday night recedes back from whence it came, one was left with three or four days of constantly, inconveniently reminding oneself to go back to the store to return those little square disc boxes, lest the family account be slapped with another late fee. Honestly, there were more than a couple of times that I can remember where my poor mother did get those cases back to the store on time, only to discover that discs were still resting peacefully inside our DVD player from three nights prior.
And yet, despite that, the atmosphere of the store, the scent of popcorn and the excitement of being there on a Friday night, of browsing the shelves by genre, my brother and I scanning new releases while my mother flicked through the family and musical section; it was all so fundamental to my love for film. It was an event, and I just think that—for people growing up now with every movie ever made at their finger-tips —it just won’t mean the same thing. Sometimes I find myself renting a film now on my laptop, one of these “you have 48 hours to watch it from when you start” situations, and it’s just a single click and it’s done. I don’t even have to get out of bed. There’s no nagging feeling of needing to return something, there’s no trip out to an alter of cinema, there’s no shelves of other movies you might like, there’s no possibility of stumbling across something new. They took all the inconvenience away. Hooray, right? I think this is another element that’s worth discussing when people talk about the “enshittification” of everything[7]—that even in areas where things are so much easier than they used to be (mostly as a result of the internet) it doesn’t necessarily mean that things are better. But it also doesn’t mean that those things are gone forever, and The Odyssey reminded me of that.
Before the first week Monday IMAX matinee showing of the film I found myself talking to a lovely older lady and her neurodivergent son outside the door to the screening room while the employees were still cleaning from the previous screening. They were there because weekly cinema trips were their ritual routine, and they always showed up early enough to be the first people. I was there because I misread the start time as 3pm, not 3:30. We talked for about twenty minutes before the employees were finished, and the conversation was all bout movies—which ones they had seen last week, what they were looking forward to, and how much they were anticipating the days showing. Over the course of that twenty minutes a steady queue formed behind us of other early and excited movie-goers, and suddenly it felt more like queuing to see a concert or a sporting event than it did going to the cinema. It was nice, it was really nice. I know I’m biased but I don’t think I’m out of line to say that it felt genuinely important, that kind of social cohesion and anticipation. You can say it’s “just a movie”, but those twenty minutes were something different, and it felt just like those Friday evening trips to Xtra-vision. It’s easy to say that it’s gone, but the reality is that it’s just in a different place.
Something that sums it up quite well for me, though just anecdotally, is that I must have digitally rented a dozen films in the last 5 years online, and I can’t recall a single one right now. Yet, as I sit here writing this, I can list off so many movies that me, my family, and my friends rented from our local Xtra-Vision. Not movies that were particularly amazing, but ones that I remembered because going out to rent them was such an event that I cared more. Monsters (2010). Your Highness (2011). Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2009). Skyfall (2012). Over the Hedge (2006).[8] Sure, not exactly a Palme d’Or winning selection, but that’s what’s amazing about film; movies aren’t just vehicles for artistic expression, they can be anchors for social cohesion, like sporting teams, like music festivals, like religion. Maybe some would say that bringing notions of the divine into the equation is hyperbolic, but there was something really special about those Friday evenings, and I think it’s the same something special that constitutes community and drives people to want to go the extra mile (literally) to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. In many ways, it’s the same core truth at the heart of that 3000 year old story: inconvenience is what ultimately builds fulfilment, and maybe it’s price we pay for meaning.
That Xtra-vision is gone now. Must have closed up around 2014 or so, whenever the line on the Netflix graph starts shooting upwards. I’ve made my peace with it. If anything, I’m aware that I was really only riding on the final wave of that industry, with the real Hay-Day being in the late nineties, just before I came around. But if anyone younger than I is reading this, having never really experienced what I’m talking about, here’s my advice. Next time you want to see a movie, either in the cinema or just on streaming, try and make an event of it. Connect up to your TV and make too much popcorn. Wear specific things that match the movie. Grab some friends, or your partner, and just see how much you can put in to the experience. See what the IMAX fuss is all about. Don’t let your only interactions with film be through a computer screen, because that’s not how it was ever supposed to be. If you want it to be special, you have to make it special. If you want to get home after 10 years of war, you have to, as the tagline for The Odyssey puts it, “defy the gods” and get there yourself.
Harry James Forkan is a Writer, Photographer, and Illustrator who will never not have time for the movies, no matter how busy life gets. You can find more of his work @h_forkan_ on instagram, or right here on Scribbled.
[1] IMAX as a brand are very meticulous about their particular aspect ratio and screen size, hence why “ye olde town multiplex” can’t just play the film as a smaller square on their screens.
[2] For what it’s worth, having seen both versions, I recommend the IMAX for reasons I’ll get to, but I wouldn’t let that put me off if I could only see the regular version.
[3] Only 45 theatres in the world have the capabilities of projecting IMAX 70mm film stock, 25 of which are in the US.
[4] No disrespect to the Pradaheads out there, I love those movies; just pulling an example of something less spectacle-focussed.
[5] The pun here is self evident.
[6] Primarily with respect to the (similarly decimated and defunct) American chain store “Blockbuster”.
[7] A term popularised by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in 2022
[8] I come from a family of five boys, which hopefully adds context to that list.