In two months, Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey will arrive in theaters. The numbers around the film, set for release on July 17, 2026, are extraordinary even by Nolan’s escalating standards: a reported $250 million production budget, the first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film, and a cast so absurdly stacked it reads less like a movie’s credits than a wishlist somebody started after winning seven Oscars. Matt Damon as Odysseus. Anne Hathaway as Penelope. Tom Holland as Telemachus. Robert Pattinson as Antinous. Zendaya as Athena. Charlize Theron as Calypso. Samantha Morton as Circe. Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Jon Bernthal as Menelaus. Benny Safdie as Agamemnon. Mia Goth as Melantho. John Leguizamo as Eumaeus. Travis Scott, of all people, somewhere in the mix.
This is, by any measure, the most expensive and ambitious cinematic adaptation of Homer’s epic ever attempted. Nolan himself called the project “an odd gap in movie history,” and he is, characteristically, taking the gap personally.
But it is not, exactly, the first attempt. Nearly thirty years ago, a different filmmaker took a real swing at The Odyssey on a fraction of the budget, for a fraction of the audience, with a cast nobody talks about anymore — and ended up making something that is, on its merits, surprisingly worth revisiting. As the hype for Nolan’s IMAX juggernaut builds toward July, it’s worth going back to May 18, 1997, the night NBC aired part one of Andrei Konchalovsky‘s The Odyssey.
You probably saw it. You almost certainly don’t remember it. Allow me to make the case.
The most interesting Odyssey adaptation you’ve already forgotten about
The 1997 Odyssey was a two-part, 176-minute miniseries that aired on consecutive nights on NBC in the spring of 1997. It was a co-production between Hallmark Entertainment and Francis Ford Coppola‘s American Zoetrope, which is a sentence that should already have your attention. The executive producers included Nicholas Meyer — the director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and one of the most quietly literary writers in late-twentieth-century commercial Hollywood — alongside Coppola, Hallmark’s Robert Halmi Sr., and Fred Fuchs, with Dyson Lovell producing on the ground. The screenplay was credited to Konchalovsky and Chris Solimine. The director was the Russian filmmaker who had spent the previous decade in Hollywood making movies like Runaway Trainand Tango & Cash — though his actual prestige credentials, like the 1979 Soviet epic Siberiade, ran longer than his American highlight reel suggests. The score was composed by Eduard Artemyev, the long-time collaborator of Andrei Tarkovsky who had written the music for Solaris and Stalker.
In other words: this was not a TV-movie quickie. This was a serious miniseries — reported budgets ranged from Variety’s contemporary $32 million figure to the $40 million number that has appeared in later reference works — with real creative pedigree, financed by Hallmark at a time when Hallmark was making event miniseries the way HBO would later make prestige cable, and shot on real locations in Malta, Turkey, England’s Shepperton Studios, and many other places around the Mediterranean. It won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries or a Special. Armand Assante, who starred as Odysseus, received a Golden Globe nomination for the role.
The cast, looked at thirty years on, is genuinely startling. Greta Scacchi as Penelope. Isabella Rossellini as Athena. Bernadette Peters as Circe. Vanessa Williams as Calypso. Eric Roberts as the suitor Eurymachus. Christopher Lee as the blind prophet Tiresias. Geraldine Chaplin in support. Jeroen Krabbé in support. Irene Papas, the great Greek actress, as Anticleia. This is the kind of ensemble that, in a feature film context with a contemporary marketing budget, would have been a cultural event. In 1997, on broadcast network television, it was — well, it was an NBC miniseries that won an Emmy and then largely faded from the active cultural conversation.
What the 1997 version got right
The Konchalovsky Odyssey, watched today, holds up better than its TV-miniseries reputation suggests. Konchalovsky and his co-writer Chris Solimine made the unusual decision to dramatize sections of the Trojan War that Homer’s Odysseyonly references in passing — the Trojan Horse sequence gets a full-fledged action set piece, for example, where the epic poem only summarizes it through flashback. Variety‘s 1997 review called the script’s reading of Homer “poster-paint” and “without insight or depth” — fair complaints from the perspective of classicists, but the trade-off bought the production something most epic adaptations don’t have, which is a clear sense of forward narrative momentum.
The casting is what most critics, then and now, single out as the production’s deepest virtue. Assante’s Odysseus — which earned him a Golden Globe nomination — has been called a charismatic, grounded reading of the character, the kind of performance that turns Odysseus’ cunning into something that reads as survival reflex rather than abstract cleverness. Greta Scacchi’s Penelope holds her own across a long, often-difficult arc. Christopher Lee turns up briefly as the blind prophet Tiresias and walks away with the scene. Isabella Rossellini, Bernadette Peters, Vanessa Williams, Eric Roberts, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeroen Krabbé, and the great Greek actress Irene Papas fill out a supporting ensemble that, in a feature-film context with a contemporary marketing budget, would have been a cultural event.
And then there’s Eduard Artemyev’s score, which is the genuinely strange thing about this production. Most American audiences hearing the Odyssey music in 1997 had no idea they were listening to the same composer who’d scored Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker, two of the most influential pieces of music in late-twentieth-century cinema. The miniseries’ music carries a haunted, modal weight that has nothing to do with the broad-strokes sword-and-sandal tradition. It is, in retrospect, the production’s secret weapon.
What it got wrong, and what Nolan is doing differently
The 1997 Odyssey has clear limits. The visual effects, while impressive for late-90s broadcast television, age badly. Variety‘s contemporary review faulted the script for simplifying signature episodes like the Lotus-Eaters and the Sirens. Later assessments have noted that the camera tends to turn away from moments of violence and spectacle in a way that reflects both the budget and the network-television standards of the time. The production’s general aesthetic is unmistakably miniseries — there’s a slightly stagey, lit-for-TV flatness that no amount of Mediterranean location work can fully shake.
Nolan, by every available indication, is operating in a completely different register. The $250 million budget, the all-IMAX format, the year of principal photography across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, and Western Sahara, the minimal use of CGI — Nolan has told Time that he is rendering the Cyclops, the sirens, and the rest of the mythological obstacles with “minimal CGI and maximum ambition,” which is the kind of phrase that signals an enormous amount of practical work happening on location with very large cameras. Where Konchalovsky was working within the visual vocabulary of mid-90s broadcast television, Nolan is working within the visual vocabulary of Lawrence of Arabiaand Apocalypse Now, with the technical resources to match.
The cast is its own statement. Where the 1997 version had a stacked but TV-budget ensemble of veterans and rising names, the 2026 version has front-page movie stars in nearly every role. Hathaway’s Penelope, by all early indications, is being framed as a major dramatic engine of the film in a way Penelope rarely gets to be on screen. Theron as Calypso. Zendaya as Athena. Pattinson as Antinous, the principal suitor. Nyong’o doubling as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, a casting choice Nolan only just confirmed in his recent Time interview. Even the Travis Scott role, which Nolan has openly said exists because he wanted to draw a connection between rap and oral poetry as analogous art forms, signals an adaptation that is interested in mining Homer for its texture rather than just its plot.
Why the 1997 version still matters
The case for revisiting the Konchalovsky miniseries before the Nolan film opens is not that it’s a hidden masterpiece. It isn’t. It’s a serious, occasionally majestic, occasionally creaky TV miniseries that was bigger and better than its broadcast-television origins suggested and that has, fairly, faded from the cultural memory of an industry that mostly forgets about miniseries that didn’t run on HBO.
The case for revisiting it is that it lets you see what the same story looks like when the resources, the technology, and the cultural moment are different. The bones of The Odyssey — Odysseus’ rage, his cleverness, his ten-year exile, the slow rebuilding of his household, the bow-stringing climax — are the same in both. The differences in how those bones get covered tell you something about what each era of Hollywood thinks the story is about. Konchalovsky’s Odyssey, finished in the immediate post-Cold War moment, is interested in homecoming and exile as historical conditions. Nolan’s, made in a year of escalating cinematic scale-wars, appears to be interested in the epic as a vehicle for the most ambitious physical filmmaking the industry can currently produce.
The 1997 Odyssey is currently streaming on Prime Video, with free-with-ads options available on Tubi, Plex, and several other services. It’s just under three hours of runtime, which is — based on Nolan’s late-April confirmation that The Odyssey runs shorter than Oppenheimer‘s 180 minutes — close to what you can expect when you sit down at the IMAX in July. You can watch the 1997 version this weekend. You should.
By July 17, the comparison will be more interesting for having made it yourself.
