Today is the day. After months of anticipation, cryptic trailers, and the kind of hype that only a post-Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan film can generate, The Odyssey officially opens in theaters and IMAX worldwide on July 17, 2026. And if the early numbers are anything to go by, the world showed up.
Thursday preview screenings pulled in $17.6 million in the U.S. alone — the best Thursday preview performance of any film released so far this year — with global opening weekend projections already climbing toward $40 million and beyond. The journey has begun. And from the sound of early reviews, it’s a journey worth taking.
The Story Behind the Story
If you haven’t revisited Homer’s Odyssey since high school English, here’s the quick version: after ten years fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus — king of Ithaca, cunning strategist, famously clever and famously flawed — tries to sail home. It takes him another ten years. Along the way he faces monsters, gods, temptresses, storms, betrayal, and his own worst impulses. His wife Penelope waits for him. His son Telemachus grows up without him. And home — the thing he’s fighting toward the entire time — becomes as much an idea as a place.
It’s one of the oldest stories in Western literature. It’s also, when you strip away the mythology, a deeply human one: about what it costs a person to be away for too long, and whether you can ever really go back.
Nolan has wanted to tell this story for years. His last film, Oppenheimer, won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director — a staggering commercial and critical success that set an almost impossible bar for whatever came next. Rather than play it safe, he bet everything on an ancient Greek epic with a $250 million budget and a philosophy that said: if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it for real.
How They Made It
The Odyssey is, among other things, a landmark of filmmaking ambition. Nolan shot the entire film on IMAX 70mm — making it the first movie in history to be captured entirely on that format. He used over two million feet of film in the process. To put that in perspective, the negative from this single production, laid end to end, would stretch for roughly 379 miles.
Principal photography lasted 91 days and took the cast and crew across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, the Western Sahara, and Malta. The crew actually sailed on open water to capture the scale and terror of Odysseus’s sea voyages. In a conversation with Empire Magazine, Nolan described the experience:
“I’ve been out on it for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, it’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift. We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people — and the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.”
He called filming on the open seas “pretty primal.” That word — primal — feels like the right one for what Nolan appears to have been reaching for: not a glossy Hollywood retelling of a myth, but something that puts you on that ship, in those waters, with that man, wondering if you’re going to make it home.
The Cast
The ensemble Nolan assembled for The Odyssey is almost absurd in its star power:
- Matt Damon as Odysseus
- Anne Hathaway as Penelope
- Tom Holland as Telemachus
- Zendaya as Athena
- Charlize Theron as Calypso
- Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Mia Goth, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Samantha Morton as Circe, and more
Several of these actors — Damon, Hathaway, Pattinson — are returning collaborators from Nolan’s previous films (Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Tenet). There’s an obvious shorthand there, a trust that comes through in what early reviewers are calling performances of remarkable depth and restraint.
Damon in particular is earning serious praise. Early reactions describe his Odysseus as carrying “raw intensity, vulnerability, and cunning” in equal measure — a man who is brilliant and also exhausted, who wins every battle and still isn’t sure he’s winning the war that matters. Hathaway’s Penelope, meanwhile, is drawing comparisons to the best work of her career: quiet, layered, and somehow managing to make the waiting feel as dramatic as the fighting.
And then there’s Travis Scott — easily the most talked-about piece of casting in the film. In the January trailer, Scott delivers a speech about the fall of Troy, and fans have been debating the choice ever since. Nolan explained it in an interview by drawing a parallel between rap and oral poetry as analogous art forms — Homer’s Odyssey was originally sung aloud, passed from performer to performer before it was ever written down. Whether you find the casting inspired or puzzling may depend entirely on how open you are to that particular idea. But it’s exactly the kind of unexpected swing that separates a Nolan film from everyone else’s.
The Vision Behind the Adaptation
What sets this apart from other mythological adaptations isn’t the scale or the cast — it’s the source material Nolan chose to honor.
Rather than drawing from older, more romanticized translations of the Odyssey, Nolan took heavy inspiration from Emily Wilson’s landmark 2017 translation — the first English-language translation of the poem by a woman in the poem’s thousands of years of recorded history. Wilson’s translation stripped away centuries of decorative language and restoration to give readers something closer to the original Greek: direct, unsentimental, and deeply attentive to the power structures that run through the story. The servants matter. The women matter. The violence has weight.
That perspective informs the film’s approach to Odysseus himself. This isn’t the gleaming heroic figure of the Hollywood tradition. It’s a complicated man who does difficult things and carries the cost of them. Nolan also cited the films of special effects artist Ray Harryhausen as an influence — leaning into a mythological visual language that’s expansive and tactile rather than sleek and digital.
Is It Good?
Early audience and critic reactions landing on Rotten Tomatoes describe it as “a cinematic masterpiece,” with particular praise for the opening Trojan Horse sequence — claustrophobic and terrifying inside the wooden structure before exploding into the chaos of the sack of Troy — and the emotional weight of the later scenes on Ithaca. Ludwig Göransson, who composed the Oscar-winning score for Oppenheimer, returns to score The Odyssey, and early word suggests the music is every bit as integral to the experience as the visuals.
Whether it reaches the heights of Oppenheimer — a film that managed the nearly impossible feat of being both a box office phenomenon and a serious artistic statement — remains to be seen. But the ambition here is undeniable. Nolan has made a two-million-feet-of-film commitment to the idea that ancient stories, told with honesty and craft, still have something to say to us.
Considering we’re all still telling this particular story three thousand years after it was first sung on a Mediterranean hillside, he’s probably right.
The Odyssey is in theaters and IMAX now.
