Christopher Nolan hasn’t made a movie since Oppenheimer swept the Oscars in 2024, and his follow-up is the biggest swing of his career. The Odyssey adapts Homer’s foundational epic, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras for the first time in film history, and it’s arriving with a $250 million budget, an A-list ensemble, and more discourse than any Nolan project since Tenet‘s release date got scrambled by a pandemic.
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When Is ‘The Odyssey’ Release Date?
The Odyssey opens in the United States and the United Kingdom on July 17, 2026, with early preview showings starting the afternoon of July 16. Universal Pictures has given the film a three-week exclusive run on IMAX screens before it expands further.
The film already had its world premiere on July 6, 2026, in London, where the first wave of critic and influencer reactions started circulating online. Universal announced the project’s title and release window all the way back in December 2024, and pre-sale tickets for opening weekend sold out within hours of going live, months before a single frame of footage was released publicly.
The Odyssey Runtime: How Long Is Nolan’s New Epic?
The Odyssey clocks in at 2 hours and 52 minutes. That makes it Nolan’s second-longest film behind Oppenheimer, which ran just over three hours.
Nolan confirmed in an interview with the Associated Press that this one would run shorter than Oppenheimer, and the final cut backs that up. For a story that famously spans a ten-year journey home and a parallel plotline in Ithaca, a runtime under three hours means Nolan is compressing a lot of ground, which aligns with early reactions describing the film as dense.
The Odyssey Full Cast: Who Plays Who
Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, trying to get home after the Trojan War. Anne Hathaway plays his wife Penelope, and Tom Holland plays their son Telemachus, who has to defend the throne while his father is missing.
The gods and monsters side of the cast is just as loaded. Zendaya plays Athena, the goddess who guides and protects Odysseus throughout his journey. Charlize Theron plays Calypso, the nymph who strands Odysseus on her island, and Lupita Nyong’o takes on a dual role as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra.
Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the most aggressive of Penelope’s suitors back in Ithaca. Jon Bernthal plays Menelaus, Benny Safdie plays Agamemnon, John Leguizamo plays Odysseus’s loyal friend Eumaeus, and Samantha Morton, Mia Goth, Himesh Patel, Corey Hawkins, James Remar, and Bill Irwin round out the supporting cast.
Rapper Travis Scott appears as a bard, a casting choice Nolan has said was meant to connect hip hop to the oral poetry tradition that originally carried Homer’s story forward. Elliot Page rounds things out as Sinon, a Greek soldier and cousin to Odysseus.
Who Is Antinous In The Odyssey? Robert Pattinson’s Character Explained
Antinous is the leader of Penelope’s suitors, the men who move into Odysseus’s palace while he’s presumed dead and try to force Penelope into remarrying one of them. In Homer’s text, he’s the most arrogant and violent of the bunch, and he’s also the first suitor Odysseus kills once he finally returns home in disguise.
Pattinson has described the character as sleazy, comparing him to James Woods’s slimy Lester Diamond from Casino. That tracks with what’s shown in the trailers, where Antinous needles Telemachus and pushes him to accept that his father isn’t coming back. In Homer’s version, Antinous also plots to ambush and kill Telemachus outright, so expect the film to lean into him as a legitimate threat rather than just a smug houseguest.
This is Pattinson’s third collaboration with Nolan after Tenet, and it puts him back in villain territory after a run of more sympathetic roles in The Batman and Tenet itself. Antinous represents hubris in Homer’s original text, the specific kind of pride that invites a brutal comeuppance, and that arc is intact in Nolan’s adaptation.
Is Elliot Page In The Odyssey? His Role Explained
Yes, Elliot Page is in The Odyssey, playing Sinon, a Greek soldier and cousin to Odysseus. That confirmation matters because for months, the internet had convinced itself Page was playing Achilles.
The Achilles rumor started based on nothing but Page’s name appearing on the film’s IMDb casting page, and it snowballed into a wave of transphobic commentary from right-wing pundits and public figures before Nolan or Universal had said a single word about the role. Once outlets like Entertainment Weekly confirmed Page was playing Sinon instead, the criticism didn’t fully disappear, with some still arguing the casting didn’t fit their idea of a Greek soldier.
In Homer’s telling, Sinon is the Greek who lets himself get captured by the Trojans and convinces them to bring the Trojan Horse inside the city walls, making him a small but pivotal figure in how Troy actually falls. Page previously worked with Nolan on Inception, so this marks their second collaboration.
The Odyssey Plot Explained: How Faithful Is It To Homer’s Odyssey?
The bones of the story closely track Homer. Odysseus spends years trying to sail home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, getting delayed by run-ins with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the sorceress Circe, the nymph Calypso, and monsters like Scylla and Charybdis, while back home, Penelope and Telemachus fend off suitors trying to claim the throne.
Where Nolan’s version diverges is in tone and presentation rather than plot mechanics. Trailers have shown the Trojan Horse sequence and the fall of Troy in far more visual detail than Homer’s text spends on it, since the epic poem actually opens after the war has already ended. Nolan has also leaned into his signature crosscutting, jumping between Odysseus’s journey and the unrest in Ithaca the same way the original poem alternates perspectives.
The dialogue is where the biggest departure shows up. Nolan has the cast speaking in plain, modern American English rather than the loftier, poetic register audiences associate with sword-and-sandals epics. That choice is tied to classicist Emily Wilson’s acclaimed translation of the Odyssey, which similarly stripped away ornate language in favor of accessibility, and Nolan has cited it as an influence on how he approached the script.
Why Is The Odyssey Facing Backlash? The Casting Controversy Explained
The Odyssey has been dealing with online backlash since its first trailer dropped, and it splits into a few different fronts. The loudest one centers on Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, historically described as the most beautiful woman in the world and typically depicted onscreen as white and blonde.
Conservative commentators, including Matt Walsh and Elon Musk, publicly attacked the casting, with Musk suggesting it was done purely to satisfy awards-season diversity considerations. Nyong’o addressed the criticism directly, pointing out that the story is mythological and that her cast reflects the world audiences actually live in. Nolan also defended the choice, saying Nyong’o brought the poise and strength the role demanded.
The other major flashpoint was the Elliot Page and Achilles rumor covered above, along with broader complaints about the modern American accents and casual dialogue, the armor and ship designs (Agamemnon’s armor drew comparisons to Nolan’s own Batsuit from The Dark Knight trilogy), and the near-total absence of Greek actors in a story rooted in Greek mythology.
Some critics have pushed back on the backlash itself, arguing it’s overblown outrage manufactured before anyone had actually seen the film. Early reactions out of the London premiere have been largely positive, which may end up doing more to shape the conversation than any pre-release controversy did.
The Odyssey’s Practical Effects: How Nolan Built A Real Trojan Horse
True to form, Nolan avoided leaning on CGI wherever possible. The production built practical sets and props across a 91-day shoot in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and Western Sahara, and that included physically constructing the Trojan Horse rather than generating it digitally.
Nolan also took the cast and crew out onto real open water for a four-month stretch to film Odysseus’s sea voyage, telling Empire that embracing the physicality of the real world shaped how the story gets told.
That commitment to practical filmmaking extended to the cameras themselves. IMAX engineered new acoustic housings, nicknamed “Keighley,” that made the notoriously loud 70mm cameras quiet enough to record live dialogue on set for the first time in the format’s history, something even Oppenheimer couldn’t fully pull off.
Where To Watch The Odyssey In IMAX 70mm
If you want the full experience Nolan built this film around, you’ll need a true 15/70mm IMAX film print, and there are only a few dozen theaters on the planet equipped to show it. Roughly 30 theaters in the US, nine in Canada, and a handful more internationally, including the BFI IMAX in London, can project the native format.
IMAX is only striking around 30 physical prints worldwide, and each 70mm reel reportedly runs about 11 miles long and weighs roughly 600 pounds, which explains why the format is so limited.
If there’s no 70mm IMAX theater near you, IMAX with Laser at the same 1.43:1 aspect ratio is the next best option, followed by standard 70mm film at 2.2:1, then Dolby Cinema and other premium large formats. Given the demand that crashed AMC and Fandango’s ticketing sites when 70mm seats went on sale, it’s worth locking in tickets as early as possible.
The Odyssey Reviews: What Critics Are Saying
Review embargoes for The Odyssey lifted around the July 6 London premiere, and the early wave has skewed positive. The Los Angeles Times’ Joshua Rothkopf called it a return to the kind of robustly entertaining action filmmaking cinema was built for, while Time Out’s Phil de Semlyen said the film earns its hype.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as a sweeping story of postwar disillusionment, and IndieWire’s Anne Thompson went so far as to name it an early Best Picture frontrunner with awards potential for Matt Damon.
Not every reaction has been glowing. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called the film clunky in stretches, though he singled out the final act as the movie’s strongest stretch. The wider batch of reviews from mainstream critics are still rolling out closer to the theatrical release, but the consensus so far suggests Nolan may have delivered one of the greatest films of his career.
The Odyssey Box Office: Opening Weekend Predictions
Tracking for The Odyssey has been unusually strong for a Nolan film, with Deadline reporting a projected $80 to $100 million domestic opening, and other trackers pushing that range as high as $97 to $132 million. For comparison, Oppenheimer was projected in the $40 to $50 million range before opening, and it ended up over $82 million.
The Odyssey has a few advantages working in its favor. It’s the only major studio tentpole releasing on July 17, and it’s already broken IMAX and premium-format presale records that outpaced both Oppenheimer and Dune: Part Two.
Nolan’s post-Oppenheimer, post-Oscar profile gives it a built-in audience regardless of the pre-release noise. Whether it can climb toward Nolan’s biggest domestic openers will likely depend on how the film’s critical and audience reception holds up once it’s actually in theaters.
FAQs
Is The Odyssey rated R?
Yes, The Odyssey carries an R rating.
Who wrote The Odyssey screenplay?
Christopher Nolan wrote, directed, and produced the film, adapting Homer’s original epic poem.
Is The Odyssey a sequel to Oppenheimer?
No, they’re unrelated. The Odyssey is Nolan’s first film since Oppenheimer’s 2023 release, but it’s a standalone story.
Does The Odyssey have a mid-credits or post-credits scene?
Nolan hasn’t confirmed any bonus scenes, but Travis Scott has an original song playing over the credits.
Was The Odyssey really shot entirely on IMAX film?
Yes, it’s the first feature in history shot entirely with IMAX 70mm cameras, using newly engineered acoustic housings to solve the format’s long-standing noise problem.
How many theaters are showing The Odyssey in true 70mm?
Roughly 30 theaters in the US, nine in Canada, and about six more internationally are equipped for native 15/70mm IMAX projection.