Disney almost made an animated Odyssey, then made Hercules instead
Rejected pitches for Sinbad was made at another studio.
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey just gave him the biggest global opening of his career. Back in 1992, Disney Animation announced its own version of Homer’s epic, along with Sinbad and Swan Lake. Not one of them got made at Disney.
Homer has been dead roughly 2,700 years and he just posted the biggest opening weekend of Christopher Nolan’s career.
Nolan’s The Odyssey pulled $124.5 million domestically and $264.1 million worldwide when it opened July 17, his best global launch ever.
Disney wanted to do it first. In animation. In 1992.
Disney’s Gong Show pitch session put The Odyssey first
In early 1992, thirty artists, writers and animators lined up at Walt Disney Feature Animation to pitch new movies. Two minutes apiece. Everybody called it the Gong Show.
The first pitch of the day was The Odyssey.
Later in that same session, an animator named Joe Haidar stood up with a different Greek myth. He’d been at Disney two years and by his own account he was a wreck about it.
His idea was Hercules, set during the Trojan War, with both sides trying to land the demigod as their secret weapon. Hercules picks a side without thinking it through, then spends the movie learning some humility about it.
Haidar walked out sure he’d bombed. By the end of the day, Hercules, The Odyssey and one other pitch had been picked for development.
Katzenberg announced The Odyssey, Sinbad and Swan Lake in 1992
That summer, Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg went public with what Disney Animation had cooking.
The Odyssey was on the list. So was Sinbad the Sailor, and Swan Lake, and Song of the Sea, which was Orpheus and Eurydice retold with whales.
Also on the list: Silly Hillbillies on Mars. Nobody bats a thousand.
Not one of those projects got made at Disney.
Why Disney never made an animated Odyssey
The Odyssey never got out of development, and the objections inside the building all circled the same problem.
A lot of people there didn’t think Homer would work as an animated comedy. The story ran too long. It didn’t have the tight central cast a Disney Renaissance movie was built around.
Odysseus wanders for ten years and runs into a fresh monster every few chapters. Great poem. Rough ninety-minute cartoon.
How Hercules beat The Odyssey at Disney Animation
By November 1992, Ron Clements and John Musker needed something to do next. They’d just finished Aladdin, and Katzenberg had dangled Treasure Planet at them if they’d deliver one more commercial hit first.
So they went digging through concept art for everything in development. Don Quixote. Around the World in Eighty Days. The Odyssey.
Then somebody showed them Haidar’s Hercules pitch.
“Hercules appealed to us partly because it didn’t seem as sacred as The Odyssey,” Clements said. Whatever they picked, they needed room to take real liberties with it.
Hercules reached theaters in 1997 with a gospel choir doing the narration and Hades running a Hollywood agent bit. Liberties taken.
Swan Lake and Sinbad got made, just not by Disney
Two more titles off Katzenberg’s 1992 list did eventually hit theaters. Neither one had Disney’s name on it.
Richard Rich co-directed The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron at Disney before leaving to start his own shop. In November 1994, his Rich Animation Studios released The Swan Princess, built on the same Swan Lake story Disney had shelved.
Rich says he arrived at it on his own, hunting for a fairy tale with a real romance in it, so this one’s a coincidence rather than a handoff. It also flopped, taking about $9.8 million against a $21 million budget, and then somehow spawned eleven more movies anyway.
Sinbad runs a straighter line back to Disney. Katzenberg left the company in 1994, co-founded DreamWorks, and brought ideas from the cancelled Disney project along with him.
DreamWorks put out Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas in 2003, Katzenberg producing, Brad Pitt voicing the lead. It took $80 million on a $60 million budget, which after marketing is not the outcome anyone wanted.
Disney’s animated Odyssey died partly because nobody could crack how to make Homer funny. Nolan never bothered trying. He shot a three-hour R-rated version on IMAX film cameras and opened bigger than anything else he’s ever made.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Boardwalk Times (July 22, 2026), Zach Perilstein’s piece on the 1992 Gong Show session, Haidar’s Hercules pitch, Katzenberg’s announced slate, why The Odyssey stalled, and the Clements quote, all sourced to Bob Thomas’s Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Hercules
Chicago Tribune (July 2, 1992), the contemporaneous report on Katzenberg announcing The Odyssey and Sinbad
Variety and The Hollywood Reporter (July 19-20, 2026), the Odyssey opening weekend figures and its ranking against the year’s other openings
Deseret News (November 18, 1994), Richard Rich on leaving Disney and choosing the Swan Lake story himself
Wikipedia (retrieved July 23, 2026), The Swan Princess budget and box office, and the Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas production history connecting it to the cancelled Disney project