How The Odyssey Saved Rochester, NY

You know The Odyssey—that Christopher Nolan film with Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway.

And you know Rochester, NY—that rusty town with a once-famous company that declared bankruptcy.

There’s a connection, and it goes beyond ruins.

Let’s back up.

Christopher Nolan, I’ve been told, is the man. Born in London—as in the UK—in 1970, the dude has turned himself into one of the highest-grossing film directors of all time.

Trust me—you know his stuff. In the mix are The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer.

And in 2026, added to that collection was The Odyssey, a film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, the one you supposedly read in high school while studying the ancient Greeks.

The gist of it is that Odysseus, using the Trojan Horse, has just helped capture Troy, and now it’s time to go home. That brief jaunt, however, turns into ten years, rife with mythical monsters, deadly temptations, and so on.

Eventually…well, you’ll just have to read/watch to find out.

Rochester, NY, I’ve been told, is not the man. Incorporated as a city in 1834, the burg once showed immense promise.

Trust me—you know its stuff. In the mix were Xerox, Bausch + Lomb, French’s, Ragu, Western Union, Champion, and even a subway system.

But its best-known product remains Kodak, which, as mentioned, declared bankruptcy in 2012 and is now used by Harvard Business School as an example of what not to do.

Of course, random people have self-published books about how things in Rochester are nowhere near as dire as advertised, but readership has mirrored Kodak’s stock price, just without the rise before the fall.

The question, of course, is why Rochester can’t be innovative like Nolan.

The genius, after all, shot The Odyssey entirely on 70 mm IMAX cameras, something that has never been done before.

If only Kodak could have provided the more than two million feet of 65 mm film used to make that happen.*

Or, at the very least, the floundering company could have provided the print film—35 mm, 70 mm five-perforation, and 70 mm IMAX—shown in theaters.**

Then, perhaps, the stories told about us, like the film format itself, would be more three-dimensional.

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*It did.

**It did.