Warner Bros. Almost Made A Mel Gibson Odyssey Six Years Before Nolan’s, And Then It Just Vanished

Before Christopher Nolan ever attached his name to Homer’s Odyssey, Warner Bros. had its own version of the same idea in development, and it starred a filmmaker who would never have needed Emily Wilson’s translation notes to tell him what the word “kleos” meant.

In September 2019, GeeksWorldWide broke the news that Mel Gibson was set to play Odysseus in a Warner Bros. feature adapting Homer’s epic. The project had a screenplay from Ann Peacock, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Jeremy Doner, a writer on The Killing. The pitch, per the trade coverage at the time, was a “loose adaptation” following the king of Ithaca’s return after twenty years away at Troy, finding his kingdom seized by Antinous and his family held captive, forcing him to fight his way back to both.

That’s the last confirmed detail anyone has. No director was ever announced. No production start date, no casting beyond Gibson, no follow-up reporting from Variety, Deadline, or The Hollywood Reporter beyond the initial trade item. The project simply stopped generating news after 2019 and was never the subject of an official cancellation announcement from Warner Bros. It didn’t die loudly. It just stopped existing in the trade press, the way a lot of announced-but-undated studio projects quietly do when nobody moves them forward.

Nobody has gone on record explaining why. But the pieces that are publicly known line up into a reasonably clear picture. Gibson’s standing in Hollywood in 2019 was still recovering from years of well-documented controversy, and Warner Bros. itself was simultaneously developing a Wild Bunch remake with Gibson attached to direct that also stalled out for years without ever reaching production, a pattern of the studio greenlighting Gibson projects in principle and then letting them sit. Three years later, Warner Bros. Discovery’s merger under David Zaslav triggered a wave of shelved and outright scrapped films, Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme among them, as the studio prioritized theatrical bets over anything seen as a financial risk. An unproven, undirected Gibson-led Odyssey adaptation with no built-in franchise value would have been exactly the kind of project that quietly gets deprioritized in that environment, whether or not it was ever formally killed. And once Nolan, a filmmaker with an unbroken string of billion-dollar box office and total creative control, committed his own Odyssey to Universal, any competing studio’s version of the same public-domain story became redundant on its face.

Gibson’s Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ are both defined by an unapologetic commitment to heroism, sacrifice, and traditional masculine virtue, filmed without a hint of self-consciousness about whether audiences would find that old-fashioned. A Gibson-led Odyssey, working from a script built around a king fighting to reclaim his home and his family from men who took both in his absence, would have told that story straight: a warrior earning his way back to the people who depend on him, against enemies who have no legitimate claim to what they’ve seized. There was no version of that pitch that required a producer explaining why the story needed “reframing” for modern audiences, and no cast member’s press tour built around telling Homer he shortchanged anyone.

Nolan’s Odyssey opened this week to the best reviews of his career, and on craft terms it’s earned them. But the film also arrives trailing six months of cast interviews arguing the poem needed correcting, a director who’s described the ancient world itself as a source of “cultural prejudice,” and a script built on a translation explicitly marketed for breaking from “patriarchal interpretations” of the original text. A version of this same story once sat two years into development at the same studio system, with a filmmaker who has never in his career apologized for telling a story about a man fighting to get home to his family. It disappeared before a single frame was shot, and the story that got made instead spent its press tour explaining why the story audiences actually wanted wasn’t the one they were getting. That’s not a coincidence worth ignoring. It’s the whole tragedy in miniature, pun very much intended.

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NEXT: Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Trades Homer’s Masculine Triumph for Modernist Regret