These days, you can rely on Christopher Nolan to make a new movie roughly every three years. The director, who has become a brand unto himself, is coming off of the tremendous success of Oppenheimer, which was both a colossal box office success and an Oscars juggernaut.
For his follow-up, Nolan is adapting Homer’s The Odyssey, one of the foundational myths in the history of stories. While there’s plenty we still don’t know about this project, it’s clearly something that Nolan fans are going to be eagerly anticipating. With that in mind, here’s everything we know about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey:
What is The Odyssey about?
The Odyssey tells the 10-year story of King Odysseus as he journeys home to the island of Ithaca in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Along the way, he encounters a series of perils, even as his family deals with an ongoing crisis at home. The trials Ulysses faces, as well as the disaster he comes home to, have been riffed on and copied for centuries. The story was originally published sometime between 750 and 650 BC, and it has since become one of the most studied texts in all of literature.
It’s been adapted for the screen three times before: A 1911 silent film version, and 1954 film called Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas, and the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is definitely a loose adaptation.
Who is in the cast of The Odyssey?
As you might expect given that it’s a Nolan project, the cast for The Odyssey is quite impressive. Matt Damon is playing Odysseus, but he’s the only actor whose role in the film is confirmed. We also know that Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Benny Safdie and Jon Bernthal have all been tapped to star in the film. Some of these actors, like Pattinson, Hathaway, and Safdie, have worked with Nolan before, while others are newcomers. Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Mia Goth, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo, and Rafi Gavron have also recently joined the cast.
Because we don’t yet know which actors will play what roles, all we can do is speculate about how significant each actor’s part in the overall production might be. Because Odysseus faces a series of trials over the course of the film, it seems likely that many of the cast members who have been named will only appear in one section. Unfortunately, we don’t know who will show up where just yet.
Have we seen any footage from the film yet?
Unfortunately there’s no footage from the film available just yet, although Universal’s distribution chief isn’t exactly tamping down expectations. He called the movie “a visionary, once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would quite likely be proud of.”
Leguizamo also spoke out about the movie on Morning Joe, saying that Nolan had a blank check even though he was given a massive budget. “Dude, you know the thing is, okay he’s got a crazy budget, it’s not small, but he runs [it] like an indie film because he’s not doing it by committee, he’s not doing it by what the studio says,” he explained.
Clearly, then, Nolan has reached the point in his career where he can do what he wants, even if it means adapting a piece of Greek literature that almost everyone studied in high school.
We don’t know when we might get a trailer for the movie, but it’s sure to come with plenty of hype from all of Nolan’s biggest fans.
Is the movie in production yet?
While we don’t know exactly how far along the movie is in its production schedule, we do know that Nolan is currently shooting the film. We know that in part because the actors have had to bow out of other obligations to shoot the film, and in part because of reports about where the film is being shot. Most notably, the film is shooting in Sicily, which is one of the places where Odysseus actually traveled on his journey. We also know that the film is shooting in the U.K., Morocco, Scotland and Ireland, meaning that Nolan is planning a truly global shoot.
When is the release date for The Odyssey?
Before we even knew what The Odyssey was about, we already knew that it was set to hit theaters on July 17, 2026. That release date is almost exactly three years after the release of Oppenheimer, which famously releaed on the same day as Barbie in July of 2023.
