2026 is Anne Hathaway’s Year
In the first few days of the local release of The Odyssey the film became New Zealand’s biggest opening of the year. It’s earned rave reviews both here at the M2 offices and across the board among critics and general audience. The women of The Odyssey all contributed magnificently.
Zendaya is at the peak of her career being in multiple films in the box office right now, doing back to back press tours. Not far behind her is Anne Hathaway who thought she had hit a quiet patch in her career, but instead has been blowing up bigger than ever. That isn’t just a pun about her latest pregnancy which she hid excellently during the Devil Wears Prada 2 tour earlier this year either. “I’m so shocked by it. I thought that I was in the small, weird indie section of my career.” she told NYT in relation to her reviving her two biggest early films, Devil Wears Prada and The Princess Diaries. “I thought that was where I was going to live. And so I’m actually pretty delighted that somebody’s asked me to come back and basically do the equivalent of a stadium tour.”
Forget those, in The Odyssey she’s incredible as Penelope. She provides the emotional heart of the movie waiting at home, the ever-loyal wife to a husband who’s spent seven years floozing with Charlize Theron’s Calypso on a beach. “We think about Penelope as a model of patience,” Hathaway explained to Elle. “But I was interested in the raw edge of her… It made me understand why she waits. She’s not waiting because she has to – she’s waiting because she wants him.”
This raw passion worked, it made her a person with needs, rather than a figure or idol of an unobtainable virtue, and in a way, that brought her full circle. We should all want to want someone as passionately as Hathaway’s Penelope.