The Odyssey

Homer Meets IMAX: A $250 Million Homecoming

The ticket pre-sales alone broke venue records at the BFI IMAX before the film had even screened. That kind of anticipation is rare, and it belongs almost entirely to one name: Christopher Nolan, whose follow-up to Oppenheimer turns out to be nothing less than Homer's ancient Greek epic, brought to life at a scale Hollywood has never attempted with this source material.

Nolan made a point of shooting the entire film on IMAX 70 mm cameras, the first feature ever to do so, across locations in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and Western Sahara. The approach is deliberate: the physical difficulty of those landscapes is meant to register as the physical difficulty of Odysseus's journey itself.

The Story

After the fall of Troy, the Greek king Odysseus begins the long voyage back to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. What should be a homecoming becomes a decade of monsters, gods, and impossible choices. The tone Nolan is aiming for sits somewhere between tactile myth and grounded action, with the gods' interventions rendered through natural phenomena rather than thunderbolts from Olympus.

Nolan drew particular inspiration from Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of the Odyssey, writing the script in a non-linear structure and making deliberate alterations to foreground the relationships between Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus.

Viewing Guide

The film runs 172 minutes and is rated R, releasing theatrically on July 17, 2026, in IMAX and premium large formats. The cast includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o, and Charlize Theron. For the full IMAX experience, booking early is not optional at this point.