Odysseus may have held out hope throughout years of setbacks, obstacles and traps laid by vengeful deities, but the man who plays him on the big screen is no optimist.
Even if Christopher Nolan‘s film adaptation of “The Odyssey” is a smash hit, Matt Damon doesn’t think we’ll see a boom in epics of a similar scale. Damon told the Times of London that shrinking revenues in Hollywood make it extremely unlikely for a studio to put up the money needed to film these massive movies.
“It’s just risk aversion,” Damon said. “It’s a brutal business — you are better off putting your money into treasury bills, historically, so it’s hard for studios.”
Damon has explained the decline of mid-sized movies and outsized epics in other venues. He famously explained how streaming media left massive holes in studio spreadsheets on an episode of “Hot Ones.” Once studios couldn’t count on a second bump of revenue beyond the box office, they began selecting safer films based on pre-existing properties that were guaranteed to get people into movie theaters.
“Those medium-sized films I loved — like courtroom dramas, family dramas — are just so hard to get made, and it is the same with something of The Odyssey’s scale too,” he told the Times. “You are just putting such a big bet out there. It’s a gamble… I can’t imagine the stars aligning in a way that would put me in this situation again, and I have always wanted to do this sort of film.”
Damon’s co-star Tom Holland is slightly more hopeful. While he agreed that a film on the same scale would be a “struggle,” he’s hopeful that younger directors will take something from the upcoming film.
“Chris probably hopes there will be films inspired by it. He’s a spokesperson for the importance of cinema, community, and so we may not get another Odyssey, or swords and sandals, but somebody might, for instance, shoot on IMAX,” he said.
