The long shadow of myth: why Hollywood keeps returning to the epics

On 9 July 2026, with Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Odyssey still months from release, the Guardian published a ranking of what it considers the twenty best mythological films ever made. The exercise is, on its face, a list — the kind of summer-filler piece that studios quietly encourage because it generates clicks while reminding readers that several of the titles are available to stream. Read it as economics, though, and it tells a more useful story: which ancient stories Hollywood keeps returning to, which it cannot stop botching, and what that pattern says about the industry's appetite for narrative weight in an era of franchise exhaustion.

The piece lands at an awkward moment for the genre. Nolan's Odyssey — long rumoured, formally announced, and treated by the trade press as one of the director's riskiest swings — arrives into a marketplace that has spent two decades treating mythology as worldbuilding rather than argument. The gods of Thor, the monsters of Clash of the Titans, the title cards of Percy Jackson all borrow the iconography of antiquity while declining its substance. The Guardian's list, by contrast, is implicitly nostalgic: it is ranking films that took the source material seriously enough to be punished for it at the box office, and ranking them now, when nostalgia itself is a marketable commodity.

The list as industrial indicator

The headline entry, as published on 9 July 2026, singles out the 2011 film Immortals — a Tarsem Singh feature starring a young Henry Cavill as Theseus — as a striking example of a film that, in the Guardian's phrasing, "barely gets near a labyrinth." It is a pointed diagnosis of the 2010s wave of Greek-mythology actioners: handsome casts, choreographed violence, very little of the strangeness that made the originals endure. Immortals is the kind of film that exists because a spreadsheet said gods-and-monsters could clear two hundred million globally, and which is now being re-evaluated because nostalgia for the era of mid-budget mythological spectacle has quietly arrived.

What the ranking reveals, when read in aggregate, is the gap between the films studios made when mythology was a theme and the films they made when mythology was a wrapper. The first category — call it the Jason and the Argonauts tradition — treats ancient material as a story worth telling carefully. The second — call it the Wrath of the Titans tradition — treats it as a reservoir of monsters and abs. The Guardian's list contains far more of the former than the industry currently produces, which is itself the reason such a list is publishable now.

What Nolan's gamble actually changes

Nolan's Odyssey is the most expensive bet on the first category in over a decade. The director's commercial record makes the project bankable in a way that a straight Homer adaptation has not been since the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — and O Brother is a Depression-era retelling, not a direct adaptation. If Nolan's film works, it reopens a lane the studios had quietly closed: serious, adult, large-budget engagement with classical material. If it fails, the genre retreats for another cycle into the wrapper mode.

The Guardian's ranking matters here because it is, in effect, the critical infrastructure preparing the ground. A reader who works through the list before Odyssey arrives is a reader primed to notice whether Nolan's Penelope has interior life, whether his Telemachus is more than a plot device, whether his Cyclops is a set piece or a scene. That is a more demanding audience than the one that turned out for the Cavill-era Theseus, and it is the audience the studios have been telling themselves does not exist.

The other shelf: biblical and folkloric

The Guardian's list is titled broadly — "From Greek epics to biblical blockbusters" — and the inclusion of biblical material alongside the Greek signals a recognition that Hollywood's mythological habit is not really about Greece at all. It is about scale: stories big enough to justify a budget, old enough to feel public-domain-safe, and morally legible enough to travel. The biblical blockbusters of the 2000s — The Passion of the Christ, Noah, the various Nativity stories — drew on the same industrial logic as the Greek films, and they ran into the same critical reception: praise for spectacle, scepticism about depth.

The deeper pattern, then, is not about mythology specifically. It is about what happens when a narrative form requires compression that the runtime will not allow. The Iliad is roughly the length of a modern fantasy trilogy. The Odyssey, properly told, is longer than that. A two-hour film has to choose what to lose, and the choices studios have made consistently privilege incident over theme. Nolan's Odyssey will face the same constraint, and the Guardian's list is implicitly asking whether any film in the genre has solved it.

What the list does not say

A ranking is also a refusal. By choosing twenty titles from a much larger possible set, the Guardian signals which versions of mythology count: mostly Western, mostly Greek or biblical, mostly Anglophone production, mostly male-centred. The absence is its own commentary. There is no entry from any non-Western mythological tradition in the headline framing; the folkloric traditions of West Africa, South Asia, and East Asia — to say nothing of Indigenous American cosmologies — are absent from the genre as the Guardian has defined it. That absence reflects the industry more than the critic: Hollywood's mythological canon has, for a century, treated antiquity as a synonym for the Mediterranean.

Nolan's Odyssey, whatever its artistic fate, will not change that. But the existence of the list — published the same week the trade press begins to ask whether Odyssey test screenings are tracking — suggests that the appetite for change is real even if the supply is not. The Guardian is, in effect, telling readers what to want before the studios tell them what they can have.

Stakes for the next cycle

If Nolan's film lands well, the next five years will see a wave of adaptations: more Greek, more biblical, more Norse, possibly — for the first time at this budget — something outside the Mediterranean canon. If it lands badly, the genre returns to its 2010s configuration, and Immortals becomes the template rather than the cautionary tale. Either way, the Guardian's list of 9 July 2026 will be cited, in five years' time, as either the warm-up or the elegy.

The honest reading is that the stakes are smaller than the coverage implies. Mythology as a Hollywood genre has been dying and reviving since the silent era; each cycle believes itself terminal. What is genuinely new is the venue: a streaming-era audience that has been trained on prestige television's willingness to spend forty hours on a single character arc, and that may finally be the audience a serious Odyssey needs. Whether that audience exists at sufficient scale to justify the budget is the only question Nolan's film has to answer.

Desk note: where the Guardian piece treats the mythological canon as a critic's problem — what to rank, what to elevate — this piece reads it as an industrial one, treating the list as a leading indicator of which ancient stories Hollywood is willing to underwrite in the next production cycle. Monexus filed it as culture because the news peg is the ranking itself; the structural read belongs on the desk that follows capital.