Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway reveal ‘The Odyssey’ set stories
Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway reveal the funniest behind-the-scenes moments from “The Odyssey,” from forgotten lines to Christopher Nolan’s style.
Video Team Entertainment
It was a long quest. At times, seemingly, a hopeless one.
But with Athena’s help, Jeffrey Golden and David Hiller of Wayne finally reached their goal. They scored two tickets to “The Odyssey.” In 70mm. Together.
“Our first attempt three weeks ago,” Hiller said. “By the time I found the seats and asked him if he could go, they were gone. Then two weeks ago, we tried again. The weekend was all sold out, for the good seats.”
The two buddies finally settled for a Wednesday night showing: 8:30 p.m. Back row. Seats N10, N11. At least they were sitting next to each other. “I only like to go to a movie that looks good on the big screen,” Hiller said.
Were they excited to finally be seeing Christopher Nolan’s much-talked-about, $250 million summer blockbuster, as they made their way through the lobby of the AMC Garden State Plaza 16 theaters in Paramus?
Does the Cyclops have one eye?
“There’s been a lot of buzz about this,” Golden said. “I saw some footage on the making of the movie; I knew it had some pretty great actors in the roles.”
People are returning to movie theaters
“The Odyssey,” which grossed more than $1.1 billion worldwide ($461 million domestically) after its first four weekends, has done its share to make 2026 break the $4 billion mark for summer revenues – something that used to be commonplace before COVID-19 shattered the moviegoing routine but has happened only once since (2023).
That, and the big writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023, delivered a devastating one-two punch to an industry that was already kneecapped by soaring production costs and reeling from the competition of home entertainment systems.
More than anything, Hollywood has been looking for a paradigm shift since 2019 – something that would get people to relearn the habit of going to the movies.
“Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) and “Barbenheimer” – the quirky double-bill of “Barbie” and Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” (2023) – were promising. But “The Odyssey,” when it opened July 17, appeared to be the black swan event everyone was praying for.
“It’s a beautiful reminder of how one movie can change the narrative, and spark a huge interest in the moviegoing experience that people thought would be lost to the small screen in the wake of the pandemic,” said Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Rentrak, a global media research company.
The success of ‘The Odyssey’ at the box office is special
What makes “The Odyssey” special? Part of it is how many boxes it ticks.
It’s a literary movie. A spectacle movie. A fantasy movie. A big-star movie (Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron). And an “auteur” movie by a superstar director. Nolan, the era’s equivalent of Stanley Kubrick, is one of the few “art” directors to be working on a gigantic canvas.
All of which makes “The Odyssey” a must-see. On a big screen. And by every kind of audience. What the industry calls a “four-quadrant” movie.
“It means every audience,” Degarabedian said. “Over 25, under 25, male and female.”
As for instance, 19-year-old Simon Sudol, of Clifton, and his mother, Aneta Pierog-Sudol – also attending that Aug. 12 screening at the AMC Garden State Plaza.
He was going because of Christopher Nolan. She was going because of Homer.
“For me, ‘The Odyssey’ was kind of mandatory in high school,” said Pierog-Sudol, who grew up in Poland. “So I really wanted to see how the director created this.”
Her son, meanwhile, was all about the big screen, and all about Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking chops. “Any Nolan movie is big,” he said. “He’s known for hitting slam-dunks.”
They had been looking, she said, for a movie they could go to together. “We were waiting for something really special,” she said. “The Odyssey” was something they were both excited by. Although, ironically, because of its huge popularity, they had to settle for sitting apart.
“We got the last seats that were available,” Simon Sudol said (they had gotten their tickets online the previous day). “It’s packed. We’re sitting so far from each other.”
Fans, to score tickets for some of these showings, are doing what they would normally do for a major pop star: lurking online, waiting for blocks of advance tickets to open up, and then grabbing while the grabbing is good.
The limited number of big screens may, in itself, account for the crunch. But there’s also been suspicion that some of the scarcity is manufactured. In a FOMA world, scarcity creates demand. “It’s almost like with a concert, the last-minute release of some seats,” Dergarabedian said.
Of course, there’s no shortage of standard-screen theaters showing “The Odyssey.” There it’s doing well, too — though not necessarily selling out.
“When it first came out, it had this big hype behind it,” said Manny Castillo, manager of the Teaneck Cinemas on Cedar Lane, which has had “The Odyssey” since it opened. “Each showing had a more significant number of people than usual.”
Now, he says, it’s been overtaken by “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” released July 31, which is an even bigger hit than “The Odyssey” — grossing more than $2 billion worldwide in its first 17 days.
‘The Odyssey’ is not your standard Hollywood hit
But “Spider-Man,” comparatively speaking, is standard Hollywood popcorn fare. The kind that brings out young, male viewers that are the backbone of the cinema audience — good times or bad. It’s not the kind of thing that brings new people into the theater.
A fast-food movie, as Dergarabedian would put it. “The Odyssey” is a fine-dining movie. The fact that it brought in all brows, high and low, is what makes it a phenomenon.
“Christopher Nolan is one of the few directors who can make a movie that wins Oscars and is also a blockbuster globally,” said Karie Bible, media analyst and film historian with Exhibitor Relations Co., a box-office tracking firm.
“You don’t see that happening so much,” she said. “What you have in this case is lightning in a bottle.”
The significance of “The Odyssey” is not so much whether it’s the highest-grossing movie of the summer, or of all time (no, though it’s up there), or in the amount of buzz it generated (a lot), but the fact that it made moviegoing a must among people who don’t often go to movies.
Can coming attractions keep up momentum?
Bringing people back to theaters makes them more likely to keep coming back. And movies, let us not forget, advertise other movies. Trailers for coming films like “Other Mommy” (Oct. 9), “Avengers: Doomsday” (Dec. 18) and “Dune: Part Three” (Dec. 18) have been seen by a record number of customers this summer. People were drawn to “The Odyssey” and “Spider-Man.”
“It’s kind of passing the baton between movies, keeping the momentum going,” Dergarabedian said. “It’s feeding the beast. This fervor for theatergoing, which is music to the ears of theater owners.”
That said, fate is a fickle thing. Odysseus knew that. So does Hollywood.
“This is a momentum business,” Dergarabedian said. “Just as suddenly the wind can be blown into the sail of the ship in ‘The Odyssey,’ it can come out of it too.”