Why Greek Mythology Keeps Getting Rebooted, and Why We Keep Watching

Last weekend, two of the five biggest films in cinemas were built on stories roughly 2,800 years old. One was Christopher Nolan's three-hour adaptation of The Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm for a reported $250 million. The other was a filmed recording of a West End musical about Orpheus, Eurydice and a bad marriage in the underworld.

Neither has a cinematic universe. Neither has a post-credits sting. Both are doing the kind of business studios usually reserve for men in capes. Something is clearly going on, and it did not begin in July.

A very old story, a very modern box office

Nolan's The Odyssey opened on 17 July and has behaved less like a film than a weather system. Its second weekend took around $90 million domestically, a drop of only 27 per cent, giving the director the best second weekend of his career and one of the strongest holds ever recorded for a film that opened above $100 million. Worldwide takings have passed $650 million.

Then came the counter-programming. Hadestown: The Musical, a live capture of the Tony-winning show filmed in London, opened to $10.2 million and became the highest-grossing debut for a filmed stage production, edging past Hamilton. It was meant to run for five days. It is now staying in cinemas indefinitely.

The ripple effect is easier to measure than most cultural moments. UK sales of The Odyssey are up roughly 70 per cent on last year. American print sales have risen 76 per cent since January, according to Circana BookScan. Spotify listening for the poem jumped more than 500 per cent on the day the film opened. Most cheeringly of all, Google searches for "learn Greek" rose by around 5,000 per cent in a fortnight, which suggests a great many people are about to discover what an aorist tense is.

This did not start with Nolan

The wave has been building for years, mostly driven by women writing and women reading.

Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles was published in 2011 and found its real audience a decade later on BookTok, where it sat alongside her Circe on every shelf worth photographing. Natalie Haynes gave the Trojan War back to its women in A Thousand Ships. Jennifer Saint did the same for Ariadne and Elektra. Pat Barker and Margaret Atwood got there earlier still.

Television has been trying to catch up ever since. Percy Jackson and the Olympians returns to Disney+ on 20 November with an adaptation of The Titan's Curse, complete with Kate McKinnon as Aphrodite, which is casting so apt it barely needs a costume. EPIC: The Musical, a nine-part retelling of the same poem Nolan has just filmed, began life as an American student's dissertation, was written in public on TikTok, and racked up tens of millions of views before a single song was finished.

In British classrooms, the effect shows up in the data. Entries for A-level Classical Civilisation rose by around a quarter in a single year between 2022 and 2023. GCSE Ancient History entries have climbed roughly 74 per cent since 2019. The subject that used to signal an expensive education has quietly become one of the fastest-growing things on the timetable.

Why the myths keep working

Nobody owns them

Every studio in the world is currently frightened of two things: paying for intellectual property, and audiences who are bored of it. Greek myth solves both problems at once. There are no rights to buy, no estate to placate, no fan wiki insisting you have contradicted a 1987 spin-off. The material is free, ancient and already stress-tested by about a hundred generations of listeners.

Retelling is the tradition

Purists occasionally object that these adaptations take liberties. They do. So did Homer. The poems we have were shaped from older oral material to thrill a particular audience at a particular moment, and everyone since has done the same thing. Virgil rewrote it for Rome. James Joyce rewrote it for Dublin. Atwood handed the microphone to Penelope. Even Emily Wilson, whose translation influenced Nolan and who has been withering about his film, conceded in her review that he is entitled to make it his own.

The narrator has changed

The oldest trick in modern publishing is to keep the plot and move the camera. Give the story to Briseis, or Medusa, or the wife who waited twenty years and was praised for her patience rather than her intelligence, and something familiar becomes genuinely new. That shift accounts for a large share of the genre's commercial success, and for its emotional appeal.

They allow big feelings without irony

Myth is one of the few registers left in which grief, rage, desire and homesickness can be enormous without anyone rolling their eyes. After a long stretch of culture that flinched from sincerity, there is real relief in a story that treats longing as the most serious subject available.

The case for a little scepticism

None of this makes the genre foolproof. Netflix's Kaos, a stylish and much-loved reimagining with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, was cancelled after a single season, which suggests audiences want the myth done well rather than simply done.

Wilson's criticism is worth taking seriously too. Her London Review of Books piece was scathing enough to crash the site, and her objection was not that Nolan changed things, but that he flattened them, producing spectacle with a thin emotional core. She has also pushed back on the idea that any retelling by a woman is automatically feminist, pointing out how many female classicists and translators the compliment quietly erases.

There is a commercial version of the same problem on the bookshop table, where "Greek mythology" now functions partly as an aesthetic: gold sprayed edges, laurel wreaths, an olive-toned cover and not much Homer inside. Enjoy those books, by all means. Just do not mistake the packaging for the tradition.

Where to start

- Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

Fast, clear and unfussy, and the version that has sold more than a million copies in the States this year alone.

- Circe by Madeline Miller.

The best entry point for anyone who wants the myth and the interiority in one book.

- A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.

Sharp, angry and very funny about who gets remembered.

- Hadestown: The Musical

 Still in cinemas, and considerably cheaper than a West End ticket.

- EPIC: The Musical

 Ideal for commutes, if you can tolerate an earworm about a cyclops.

The long way home

For all the IMAX cameras and the streaming budgets, the appeal is fairly simple. The Odyssey is a story about a clever, flawed, exhausted person trying to get back to the people who love him, and discovering that arriving is harder than leaving. We keep filming it because we keep needing it. The gods are optional. The homesickness is not.