Nolan’s The Odyssey promises his biggest film yet with all-IMAX shoot

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey reached its London world premiere with an estimated $250 million price tag and a production footprint that stretched to more than 2 million feet of film. Nolan has said the project "needed to be the biggest film" he has made, and he described it as the first narrative feature shot entirely with IMAX cameras.

The film is Nolan’s 13th directorial feature and pairs his screenplay, based on Homer’s ancient poem, with a producer credit shared with Emma Thomas through Syncopy. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, while Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Will Yun Lee, Mia Goth, Jimmy Gonzales, Elliot Page and Jovan Adepo fill out an unusually large ensemble. Universal Pictures lists the film for theatrical release on July 17, 2026, giving the studio a summer tentpole built as much around Nolan’s technical ambition as around a familiar story.

That scale is part of the sell. Universal’s first teaser leaned on shipwrecks, monsters and the physical size of the production, a marketing approach that turns the shoot itself into a commercial hook. Nolan’s name still gives the campaign a premium edge: after Oppenheimer, Inception, Interstellar and The Dark Knight, he is one of the few directors whose creative control can be packaged as part of the event.

Nolan has also argued that modern Marvel and DC superheroes trace "pretty directly" to Homeric epics, a line that helps explain why a 3,000-year-old poem can still anchor a modern studio release. The Odyssey has been adapted before, including a 1911 silent film, the 1954 film Ulysses with Kirk Douglas and the Coen brothers’ 2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but Nolan’s version is being sold as the most extreme iteration yet. In an industry built on recognizable intellectual property, that is the point: scale, not just story, is the product Universal is betting audiences will buy.