This summer, Christopher Nolan dominated the box office with The Odyssey, which has passed $1.6 billion worldwide and became his first billion-dollar release since The Dark Knight Rises. But the version of Nolan making a Greek epic in his fifties, with full-scale IMAX resources and near-total creative control, arguably only exists because a very different Greek epic slipped away from him in his early thirties.
Warner Bros. had originally hired him to direct Troy after Insomnia, before Wolfgang Petersen reclaimed the project he’d developed and the studio handed Nolan Batman Begins as what David S. Goyer once called a “consolation prize.” Twenty-two years later, Petersen’s film is enjoying arguably the strangest afterlife of any mid-2000s blockbuster.
Christopher Nolan Nearly Directed ‘Troy’ Before Warner Bros. Gave Him ‘Batman’ Begins
Troy has now spent 57 consecutive days in Apple TV’s US top ten, sitting at number two on Sept. 20 per FlixPatrol, behind only Ryan Reynolds’ brand-new Mayday and ahead of far fresher titles like Zero Dark Thirty. Nolan himself confirmed the near-miss in Empire‘s cover story last November:
“I was originally hired by Warner Bros. to direct Troy. Wolfgang had developed it, and so when the studio decided not to proceed with his superhero movie [Batman vs. Superman], he wanted it back. At the end of the day, it was a world that I was very interested to explore. So it’s been at the back of my mind for a very long time. Certain images, particularly. How I wanted to handle the Trojan horse, things like that.”
The Trojan horse imagery he was sketching in 2003 presumably fed directly into The Odyssey‘s opening stretch, which means the film currently charting on Apple TV is something like a ghost of the movie Nolan never got to make, finally answered by the one he did. Troy first surged onto charts worldwide back in July when The Odyssey opened, cracking the top ten on Apple TV and Prime Video in more than 25 countries and climbing HBO Max rankings across Europe and Latin America.
The film actually hit number one on Apple TV’s US chart in early September, only ceding the spot when Mayday launched, and it has held near the top ever since. The likeliest explanation is simple enough. The Odyssey still hasn’t reached streaming, Nolan’s film sent a lot of casual viewers down a Greek mythology rabbit hole, and Petersen’s take on the Iliad is the only big-budget Hollywood treatment of that material available to watch at home.
22 Years Later, ‘Troy’ Is Climbing the Apple TV Charts
Troy was never a flop, grossing $497 million against a $175 million budget and finishing among 2004’s biggest earners, but its 53% critics’ score and Brad Pitt’s own later ambivalence about the production left it filed away as a handsome misfire. It’s hard not to wonder whether critics in 2004 were grading it against an idea of the prestige epic that Gladiator had set, when what Petersen delivered was closer to sturdy spectacle with an unusually good Eric Bana performance holding the center.
As for the road not taken, the gods probably got it right. A Troy directed by a pre-Batman Nolan might have been fascinating, but it would have arrived before he had the clout to shoot ancient warfare his way, and Hollywood would likely have gotten neither The Dark Knight trilogy nor this year’s Odyssey in the form we know them.
