The Odyssey sound crew has joked that Matt Damon and the major actors got the best snacks on set while everyone else made do. Christopher Nolan’s epic demanded a sprawling production, and sprawling productions run on catering. Behind every sweeping ocean scene sits a crew with strong opinions about lunch. One member of the sound team finally decided to share those opinions in public, and the snack ranking is brutally honest.

While the stars reportedly enjoyed the premium treats, the sound department found out that the pecking order on set stretches all the way to the snack table.

Willie Burton has revealed that snack quality on The Odyssey depended on star power. He made the joke at the Hamilton Behind the Camera Awards, presented by Variety. Matt Damon led the cast as Odysseus in the Christopher Nolan film. Burton framed himself as the snack distributor.

“Matt and the major actors got the best snacks,” Burton said.

He then added, “The crew on the ship, I gave them the worst snacks.”

The joke carries extra bite given how well the film is performing. The Odyssey has earned approximately $1.8 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time and Christopher Nolan's biggest box-office hit. It has also broken records for Universal Pictures and IMAX, crossing $555 million in IMAX ticket sales alone. With numbers like that, the snack budget could perhaps have stretched a little further down the call sheet.

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While the stars feasted on the best snacks and the crew got scraps, a Homer translator says the film’s real shortage was never in the catering tent.

Emily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania classics professor who produced the 2017 English translation of Homer’s epic, has doubled down on her criticism of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. In an op-ed for The Atlantic, she said the film looks gorgeous but leaves the heart of the story behind. Her point is that the script keeps announcing the value of compassion and hospitality while the visuals care more about machinery and spectacle.

Wilson focuses on the film’s handling of the Trojan Horse and its repeated nods to Zeus’ law, the ancient principle of treating strangers with generosity. In her view, the movie never fully explores the human cost of the conflict or the choices that led to it. She had previously questioned the screenplay’s emotional and ethical depth in a review for the London Review of Books. Given the film’s emphasis on hospitality, perhaps someone should remind the crew that generosity was supposed to extend beyond Zeus and all the way to the snack table.

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What are your thoughts on Matt Damon’s snack privileges on The Odyssey? Let us know in the comments.