I primarily write about television, but I often see movies and have thoughts on them beyond what I might say on my Letterboxd. So from time to time, I'll write something about a film. This is one of those times. There will be spoilers for The Odyssey, but not until later in the article, and I'll put in a warning before then.
I've heard some people express surprise that Christopher Nolan is the first filmmaker to make an adaptation of The Odyssey(*) which in our cynical modern Hollywood moment could be viewed as one of the very first pieces of IP.
(*) A straightforward adaptation, anyway, as opposed to a pastiche like O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Technically, Italian director Franco Rossi and Tango & Cash auteur Andrei Konchalovsky beat Nolan to the punch by, respectively, 58 and 29 years. Their versions just happened to be made for television: Rossi's as an eight-episode Italian miniseries from 1968, Konchalovsky's as a two-part NBC miniseries from 1997, starring Armand Assante as Odysseus, Greta Scacchi as Penelope, Bernadette Peters as Circe, and Vanessa Williams as Calypso, among others.
It makes sense that TV would have tackled this first. The Odyssey is episodic by design: Odysseus battles a cyclops. Circe turns Odysseus' men into pigs. Odysseus journeys to the Underworld. Etc. There's the broader tale of his struggle to get home to his wife and son, but the source material is structured as a collection of vignettes.
I haven't seen the Italian version, and my memories of the NBC one are faint but unimpressed. (This matches the commentary I've seen from people who have watched some or all of it on YouTube as prep for Nolan's version.) But if any filmmaker with even slightly less clout than Nolan had attempted to adapt the story again, it almost certainly would have to have been made as an 8- or 9-episode Apple miniseries. This version would have looked pretty handsome, would have featured a lot of recognizable faces — maybe Pedro Pascal as Odysseus? — and probably would have had a memorable episode or three. I suspect I would have liked it, while also feeling that it ran a little too long, and ran out of energy before the story reached its climax in Ithaca.
But just because a story is episodic doesn't automatically mean it should be turned into a bunch of individual episodes. And thank goodness it was Nolan who not only wanted to tackle this source material, but who insisted on doing it in this way.