Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' (July 2026): The First Film Ever Shot Entirely on IMAX 70mm — Full Cast, Trailers, and Everything We Know

Christopher Nolan's Most Ambitious Film Has Been More Than a Decade in the Making

Christopher Nolan has spent his career pushing the physical limits of cinema — shooting in the real desert for Dunkirk, detonating a practical nuclear test site for Oppenheimer, building actual rotating hallways for Inception. The question that has followed him since The Dark Knight is simple: when will he attempt something that cannot be done at all? The answer, arriving on July 17, 2026, is The Odyssey.

The film is the first in the history of cinema to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras. Not partially — not with IMAX cameras used for select sequences alongside other formats — but entirely. Over 2 million feet (610 kilometres) of IMAX 70mm film was used to complete principal photography. The IMAX cameras Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema used were a newly developed lighter and quieter version created at Nolan's request, because the previous models were too large and loud for the intimate scenes the material demanded. The film is the 39th produced in Nolan's career at this scale, and it is confirmed by Variety as the most expensive of his career, with an estimated budget of $250 million.

IMDb ranked The Odyssey as the most anticipated film of 2026. Variety has predicted it will become the highest-grossing film of the year. TheWrap predicted it could surpass The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises to become Nolan's highest-grossing film. The film has been in production since February 2025 and wrapped September 2025 — nine days ahead of schedule.

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The Source Material: Why Homer's Odyssey

Homer's Odyssey, composed around the 8th century BCE, follows Odysseus, King of Ithaca, on his decade-long journey home after the Trojan War. It is one of the foundational texts of Western literature — a 12,000-line epic poem covering encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch-goddess Circe, the Sirens, the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, a seven-year captivity by the nymph Calypso on her island, and the divine intervention of Athena in guiding his path. It ends with Odysseus returning in disguise to Ithaca to find his house overrun with suitors pursuing his wife Penelope and his adult son Telemachus unable to remove them.

Nolan began writing the screenplay in March 2024 and drew inspiration from the 2017 translation by classicist Emily Wilson — the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman — which emphasised the poem's directness, physicality, and moral ambiguity over the romanticised versions familiar from earlier adaptations. He secured the project with Universal Pictures by October 2024 and it was officially announced in December.

Nolan's stated approach is realism rather than fantasy spectacle. In a November 2025 interview with Empire, he explained: "As a filmmaker, you're looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven't been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with — Ray Harryhausen movies and other things — I'd never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do." He has described his approach as closer to Troy than Clash of the Titans — grounding mythological elements in physical reality rather than treating them as pure fantasy. The gods and monsters are real in the world of the film, but they are rendered as forces that ancient people would have encountered and interpreted through the lens of the natural world.

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The Full Cast

Matt Damon as Odysseus: The Greek king of Ithaca, veteran of the Trojan War, and the film's central character. Damon, who previously appeared in a supporting role in Oppenheimer, was the first cast member attached to the project in October 2024 and confirmed in the lead role in February 2025. Universal released a first-look image the same month — Damon in a Corinthian helmet with a red plume, which historians promptly noted as anachronistic for the Mycenaean Bronze Age period in which the Odyssey is set. The historical accuracy debate was considered the most significant pre-production controversy of the production.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope: Odysseus's wife, who spends the years of his absence fending off suitors with a weaving trick — promising to choose a new husband when she finishes a burial shroud, then secretly unravelling it each night. Hathaway has worked with Nolan previously in The Dark Knight Rises.

Tom Holland as Telemachus: Odysseus's son, who sets out to find his father while Penelope is besieged by suitors. Holland described receiving the script as the best he has ever read. His role runs parallel to Odysseus's journey and is the film's secondary emotional centre.

Zendaya as Athena: The goddess of wisdom and Odysseus's divine patron throughout the epic. Athena appears in disguise across the poem, intervening to protect Odysseus and guide Telemachus. Zendaya's casting was described by the studio as one of the film's "most inspired choices."

Robert Pattinson as Antinous: The most aggressive and dangerous of the suitors attempting to marry Penelope. Antinous is the first suitor Odysseus kills when he returns in disguise. Pattinson is reuniting with Nolan after Tenet (2020).

Charlize Theron as Circe: The witch-goddess who transforms Odysseus's men into pigs before being compelled — by Hermes's intervention in the original poem — to restore them. Circe's island is one of Odysseus's longest and most significant detours.

Lupita Nyong'o as Calypso: The nymph who imprisons Odysseus for seven years on her island, offering him immortality in exchange for staying. The film's interpretation of the captivity scenes — whether Odysseus is purely unwilling or more conflicted — is expected to be one of its more nuanced narrative choices.

Jon Bernthal as Menelaus: King of Sparta, whose wife Helen's abduction to Troy started the war. In Homer's poem, Telemachus visits Menelaus and Helen in Sparta seeking news of his father. The prologue that has been seen publicly is narrated from Menelaus's perspective.

Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, Mia Goth, John Leguizamo, Travis Scott in undisclosed or supporting roles. Travis Scott's casting — announced January 2026 — generated significant online attention. Tom Holland noted that Scott was on set "method" and "very serious."

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The IMAX Technology: What Makes This Different

Since The Dark Knight in 2008, Nolan has progressively expanded his use of IMAX cameras — sequences here, sequences there. Interstellar used IMAX for large portions of the film. Oppenheimer used IMAX for significant sequences. But every previous Nolan film mixed IMAX footage with standard 35mm or digital acquisition. The Odyssey is the first feature film in history to shoot everything on IMAX.

The implications are visual and physical simultaneously. IMAX 70mm film produces an image with roughly ten times the resolution of standard HD video and significantly larger than standard 35mm film, filling the full height of an IMAX screen with information rather than letterboxing the image. Watching a film shot entirely on IMAX 70mm on an actual IMAX screen means watching at the maximum visual fidelity achievable in current cinema — no upscaling, no digital conversion. The image is native to the format.

According to The Credits (MPA), IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond confirmed the film uses "never-before-seen IMAX technology" — the lighter and quieter camera versions Nolan requested. Universal Pictures' president of domestic theatrical distribution Jim Orr described it as "a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology" and called it "a once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece." IMAX 70mm tickets were made available July 17, 2025 — a full year before the release — in an unprecedented move. Half of the 22 US IMAX 70mm-capable theatres sold out within 12 hours, generating approximately $1.5 million in advance ticket sales.

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The Production: Where and How It Was Made

Principal photography ran from February 25 to August 8, 2025 — 91 days, nine days ahead of schedule. The production shot across five countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy (including Sicily's island of Favignana, believed by some to be the "goat island" where Odysseus landed), Iceland, and Scotland, with additional Hollywood soundstage work. Nolan described the choice of real locations as essential to understanding the material: "I 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."

The production used the working title Charlie's Tale. The Russo Brothers, who noted scheduling conflicts with Downey Jr.'s The Odyssey commitments when explaining RDJ's unavailability for The Odyssey (an unrelated production), confirmed that Nolan's film has a genuinely global cast requirement that created significant logistical demands.

The crew is Nolan's most consistent team: cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (every Nolan film since Interstellar), editor Jennifer Lame (Tenet, Oppenheimer), composer Ludwig Göransson (his third Nolan film, after Tenet and Oppenheimer), and visual effects teams DNEG and Wētā Workshop. The film is produced through Nolan's Syncopy company with wife Emma Thomas — who won the Best Picture Oscar for Oppenheimer — co-producing.

The Prologue and Trailers: What Audiences Have Already Seen

A six-minute prologue debuted in IMAX 70mm theatres on December 12, 2025, playing before screenings of Sinners and One Battle After Another. The sequence depicts the Trojan Horse sequence — the moment Odysseus and his men smuggle themselves inside the wooden horse, are dragged into Troy, wait for nightfall, then emerge to open the city gates and begin the slaughter. The prologue is narrated from Menelaus's perspective, framing it as a story he tells Telemachus about fighting alongside Odysseus. A practical Cyclops model of Polyphemus briefly appears, establishing Nolan's grounded approach to the fantastical elements.

Early reactions from those who saw the prologue in theatres were among the most emphatic responses to any pre-release preview in recent cinema history. Multiple critics described it as the most technically impressive footage Nolan has ever produced. One wrote that the prologue was "already one of the most staggering achievements in modern film." Composer Ludwig Göransson's score was singled out consistently — described as "propulsive," "punching through your chest," and compared to the first audiences hearing Hans Zimmer's The Dark Knight score before that film's release.

The first full official trailer was released in December 2025 and accumulated over 121 million global views in its first 24 hours. A second trailer featuring Travis Scott arrived in January 2026. The official trailer focuses primarily on Odysseus's journey and his relationship with Penelope, and closes on what multiple reviewers called its most emotionally resonant moment: Penelope asking Odysseus to promise he will return, and Odysseus hesitating — unable to make a promise he is not sure he can keep.

Ludwig Göransson: The Score That Could Win the Oscar

Ludwig Göransson won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Oppenheimer (2024). Before that, he won for Black Panther (2019). He scored Tenet, the original Creed, and the first three seasons of The Mandalorian. In March 2026, he won the Oscar for Best Original Song as co-writer of "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters.

The Odyssey marks his third collaboration with Nolan. Based on the prologue alone, critics have already placed him in the early conversation for the 2027 Best Original Score Oscar. The score uses a combination of ancient Greek musical aesthetics and modern orchestral tension-building — practical instruments alongside electronic sound design — in a way that Göransson himself described as an attempt to make antiquity feel physically present rather than historically distant.

What to Expect: The Film's Approach to Myth

The central creative question for any Odyssey adaptation is how to handle the supernatural. A director who commits to realism faces the challenge that the poem's most famous sequences — the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe's transformation, the descent into the underworld — cannot be rendered without either departing from reality or finding a way to make them feel real within a grounded world.

Nolan's stated solution is the one he articulated to Empire: ancient people experienced natural phenomena — lightning, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, disease, hallucination, war — and understood them through a theological framework. By grounding these encounters in physical reality while honouring the mythological interpretation, the film aims to make the gods and monsters feel as real as the Trojan War rather than as special effects.

The prologue's practical Cyclops is the first indication of how this works in practice: not a CGI creation but a physical model, scaled and photographed on IMAX 70mm in a way that makes its presence in the frame feel material rather than digital. Whether this approach holds across the film's full runtime — and specifically how Circe's transformations and the Sirens are handled — is the anticipation that audiences will carry into July 17.

The film is rated PG-13 — Nolan's first such rating since Interstellar — expanding its potential audience beyond the R-rated Oppenheimer. Variety's tracking puts its domestic opening at $120 million or above, which would place it among the largest non-superhero openings in history. WinTK will continue tracking The Odyssey's release and covering major film events as July 17 approaches.