The owners of a replica Viking ship used in The Odyssey said Universal Pictures failed to pay them $6,000 for repairing the damage caused by six months of filming, a claim the studio rejected.
The Glad av Gillberga belongs to a non-profit Viking heritage association, Vikingaleden, in western Sweden’s Värmland. The 17.5m-long replica featured as one of the escort ships in Odysseus’s fleet in the Christopher Nolan adaptation of Homer’s epic, according to Swedish outlet Dagens Nyheter.
Vikingaleden chair Peter Olausson claimed the production company had agreed to pay a rental fee of about $41,000 for the vessel as well as the cost of repairing any damage sustained during filming, but reneged on the latter.
“We’re only charging for the material cost, not the labour. Of course Universal can afford this $6,000. We feel forgotten,” he told the Guardian. “The agreement was that we would fix it, and get financially reimbursed.”
Universal denied that any money remained outstanding. “Our records show that all invoices relating to the Glad av Gillberga were paid in full, including repairs. The studio and the production have contacted the association to clear up any misunderstanding,” a Universal spokesperson said in a statement to The Independent.
The Independent has contacted Vikingaleden for comment.
The Odyssey follows Odysseus’s decade-long journey home after the Trojan war as he faces mythical creatures, hostile gods, and repeated trials before reuniting with his wife, Penelope. It stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, alongside Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, and John Leguizamo.
The film, released on 17 July, earned $264.1m worldwide in its opening weekend, marking the biggest debut of Nolan’s career, and was widely praised by critics.
“As a feat of pure adaptation, Nolan has achieved something I admittedly thought was near impossible,” The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote in her five-star review.
“His stamp is all over the film – this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare – yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text.”
Olausson said his enjoyment of watching The Odyssey had been overshadowed by the payment dispute.
He described the film as “fantastic”, adding that he spotted the Glad av Gillberga about 10 times on screen. “Of course, you can’t see any real detail but for me it was, ‘Ah, there’s Glad! There’s my ship.’”
The Glad av Gillberga, crafted using traditional methods in the 1990s, is a replica of an 11th-century Viking ship discovered in Denmark’s Roskilde Fjord.
It has sailed the Baltic, the North Sea, and even crossed the Atlantic to Canada.
According to Dagens Nyheter, the ship returned from filming in the Mediterranean with patches of damaged paint, damaged mast fittings, a crack in the hull, and parts of the support frame requiring replacement.
Olausson said the repairs delayed the vessel’s return to service by around two months, resulting in a loss of income because they couldn’t take bookings from schools, companies, and community groups during part of the summer season.
The agreement signed by Vikingaleden with Charlie’s Tale, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, in 2024 required the production company to return the vessel “in good condition” and, according to The New York Times, “replace or repair any injury” beyond “reasonable wear and tear”.
After the ship returned from filming, volunteers carried out the necessary repairs and Olausson sent Universal an invoice in December 2025 for about $6,000.
He added the amount had already been reduced from about $9,000 in the hope of resolving the matter before Christmas.
The Glad av Gillberga was one of several replica vessels used in The Odyssey. Although the story is set in ancient Greece centuries before the Viking Age, the film chose the Swedish replica as one the escort vessels in Odysseus’s flotilla and the 35m Norwegian replica Draken Harald Hårfagre as the on-screen Greek king’s principal ship, according to The Guardian.
Björn Ahlander, the captain of the Glad av Gillberga, previously told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the six-month shoot around Greek and Italian islands required the crew to remove modern fittings from the ship and live on an open deck throughout filming. “We rebuilt the ship into an ancient Greek ship. We removed the tents and all the modern things and had an open deck that we lived on during this time. It was quite tough,” he said.
