The box office triumph of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey was not a given, and it is good news well beyond the film industry. It contradicts two beliefs that have shaped two decades of cultural and educational policy: that the classics have nothing left to say, or are even harmful, and that the public no longer wants complex work. A look at a double rebuttal, and at what it tells us about mental models and their consequences.
Let us enjoy the moment: a 2,700-year-old poem is breaking box office records in the United States and worldwide. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, three hours of Homeric epic and rated R, is filling 2 a.m. showings. Moviegoers are crossing entire states to find a theater screening it in 70 mm. Every studio forecast was exceeded on opening night. Nothing about this film matches the supposed formula for success, and everything seemed to work against it: no sequel, no franchise, no superheroes, an ancient and complex text, and a story that is just as complex. But that is not the most remarkable part. This triumph comes after two decades in which we were methodically told that works of this kind had nothing left to say to us.
A suspect work
What took hold in parts of the academic, political, and cultural world in recent years, particularly in English-speaking countries, is a mental model: the classics are not merely dated, they are suspect. As pillars of a Western culture treated as a legacy to be deconstructed, or even destroyed, rather than passed on, they have been put on permanent trial. The record is clear. Howard University closed its classics department in 2021. That same year, Princeton dropped the Greek and Latin requirement for its own classics majors. In the United States, the #DisruptTexts movement campaigned to remove Homer from high school curricula. In France, the teaching of Latin and Greek declines year after year, reform after reform. The logic of this model: because these works come from an unequal, slave-holding, and “patriarchal” world, they are assumed to carry its values, and passing them on would amount to endorsing them.
This first model rests on a second and deeper one: contempt for the public. Audiences are assumed to be incapable of demanding work, to want easy entertainment, to need protection from difficult works rather than elevation through them. This contempt runs through the studios, which recycle the same franchises endlessly on the grounds that “this is what people want.” It also runs through educational and cultural institutions, which simplify curricula and favor works that are “accessible” or that “speak to young people.” The paradox is striking: those who claim to stand for the emancipation of the public are the ones who treat it as a minor. The ambition to raise everyone through contact with great works, long at the heart of the educational project, has become suspect of elitism, the cardinal sin of our time. Yet it is the abandonment of that ambition that is elitist. When schools stop transmitting the classics, the classics do not disappear. They become the privilege of those who reach them through their family background.
The film’s success invalidates both models at once. Nolan did not simplify the text. He did not force it into the present. He added no instruction manual and no preemptive apology. His interpretation, his artistic choices, and the quality of the film itself are all open to debate, but he trusted the work and he trusted the viewer, and viewers responded in large numbers, across all generations. Part of the audience filling theaters is the same age as those we are told no longer read and care only about TikTok. Nolan acted as a true entrepreneur: he did not give the public what it was asking for, or what it was said to be asking for. He bet that the public would like the product once it had it in hand. And Homer’s work does speak of the desire to return home, of loyalty and temptation, of identity lost and reclaimed, of ideals betrayed, of memory and grief, of violence, revenge, and seduction. These are permanent themes. Nothing that makes up a human life is missing from it, which is why twenty-seven centuries have changed nothing. The work speaks with force to audiences in 2026 as it already spoke to those who heard Homer.
The lesson goes beyond film. Great works do not need to be protected from the public, and the public does not need to be protected from them. Keeping the two apart impoverishes both. A mental model is never simply an opinion. It drives decisions – closing a department, rewriting a curriculum without Greek or Latin, producing yet another sequel – and those decisions have real consequences. The two mental models, the harmfulness of the classics and the stupidity of the public, have deprived entire cohorts of students and adults of knowledge of their cultural heritage, and of a better capacity to understand the complex and uncertain world they live in.
Excellent news
This success is therefore excellent news. It is a rebuke to everyone who wanted to destroy that heritage, and it carries weight precisely because it comes from the public rather than from institutions. One can hope it signals a change. It is hard to argue that a work is dead when millions of people are lining up to hear it. Thanks to Christopher Nolan for making the classics popular again.
🇫🇷 A version in French of this article is available here.
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