'The Odyssey' Already Confirmed to Get New Reboot After Christopher Nolan's Release

Homer’s poem has pulled filmmakers back to the same shores for the better part of a century, from Italy’s 1968 L’Odissea to the 1997 NBC miniseries that won Andrei Konchalovsky an Emmy. By one count, it has been adapted for the screen more than a dozen times, so the material is well-used. This week, though, the story belongs to Christopher Nolan, whose $250 million adaptation reaches theaters on Friday, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film and arriving on a wave of strong early reviews and Oscar chatter.

That timing won’t be lost on the team behind a second, entirely separate take now heading for television. As Nolan’s The Odyssey lands in cinemas, an independent European-U.S. series titled Odysseus has been unveiled, produced out of Athens by Tanweer, the Greek company handling Nolan’s film in the region. The two projects share a myth and a distributor, and, the producers stress, little else.

As Deadlinereports, running the show is Karl Gajdusek, the showrunner and executive producer of the first season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, with Dutch director Roel Reiné (Halo, Black Sails) attached to direct. The pilot comes from Sean Finegan, Scott Windhauser, Noah Lang, and Blake Hoss, with Tanweer producing alongside U.S. label Tectonic and the U.S.-Armenian outfit USATV.

The pitch leans hard into history rather than spectacle. Where Nolan’s film promises gods, monsters, and IMAX grandeur with Matt Damon leading a stacked ensemble, this Odysseus is being framed as a grounded, realpolitik account of the Bronze Age world that produced the legend, one of blood, ships, and betrayal set against the collapse that eventually broke the known world apart.

“There’s something huge about taking on this epic story in the most grounded and realpolitik way we can,” Gajdusek said. The team has been developing it for close to five years, and they are open to seeding an expanded series universe rather than a one-off, which is a fair distance from the “true story” behind the myth that Gajdusek describes chasing.

For now, plenty is still unsettled. There is no streaming home attached, no cast, and no release window, with production only targeted for early next year across Greece and Armenia. That puts Odysseus years behind Nolan’s film in practice, arriving at a moment Nolan will have largely defined first.

Whether audiences have the appetite for two versions of the same journey is the more interesting question, and the answer may rest in part on how The Odyssey performs this weekend. A grounded, historical take is a genuinely different proposition, though, and if Gajdusek can carry over even a fraction of the character work that made Stranger Things land, the space between myth and history is where this one would have to earn its place.