What Is the 2026 Odyssey Movie Based On?

If you have seen the trailer or the posters, the question comes up fast: is this based on a book? The short answer is that the 2026 film adapts one of the oldest stories in the Western world - Homer's Odyssey, an epic poem written down around the 8th century BCE. It is not based on a novel, a play, or a true story. The Odyssey is the original that almost everything else borrows from.

The source is a poem, not a novel

The Odyssey is a Greek epic of roughly 12,000 lines, traditionally credited to a poet we call Homer. It came out of an oral tradition - composed to be performed aloud, from memory, long before it was ever a text on a page. That is why it predates the novel by more than two thousand years, and why it does not read like one.

What it does read like is a sequence of 24 short "books" - closer to chapters than to volumes. Most take twenty-five to forty minutes. Held together, they run about the length of a substantial novel, which is why reading the whole thing is far more doable than its reputation suggests. Our honest guide to reading it does the math.

What the film is drawing from

Every image the film is built on comes from a specific place in the poem:

• The man on the raft, refusing immortality - Book 5, on Calypso's island.
• The one-eyed giant - the Cyclops, Book 9, the most famous single episode.
• The witch who turns men into animals - Circe, Book 10.
• The land of the dead - Book 11, where Odysseus speaks with the shades.
• The Sirens, and the monster between the rock and the whirlpool - Book 12.
• The long, disguised, dangerous homecoming - Books 13 to 24, which are really the heart of it.

If you want the whole route in one picture, the journey map from Troy to Ithaca lays it out in order.

So it is not a true story?

No. Odysseus and his voyage are myth, not history. The poem is set in the years after the Trojan War - a war later Greeks believed had really happened - but the gods, the monsters, and the ten years of wandering are imagination. That is part of what makes the Odyssey strange and durable: it is one of the first stories to be openly about storytelling. Half of the wildest material is told by Odysseus himself, at a banquet, in his own voice - so you are always half-wondering how much of it to believe.

How to read the source before (or after) the film

You do not need to have read anything before the film to follow it - but the poem lands harder when you know the route. If you want to choose between modern versions, our guide to translations compares the common ones for a first read.

If you would rather have the whole thing in one place - the complete poem plus a modern companion built to carry you through it - the Home Pack is the direct route. It pairs the full Odyssey (as a designed PDF and an EPUB reader file) with an opening for each of the 24 books, a journey map, character cards, and a five-evening route, for $19.