Everything to Know About Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

To follow up 2023’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan has chosen one of history’s great epics for his next blockbuster. The Odyssey will arrive in theaters this summer, and a stacked cast of Hollywood’s biggest stars will help bring Homer’s ancient Greek story to very modern IMAX audiences. Here’s everything we know about the film so far, including its first full-length trailer:

Is there a trailer for The Odyssey?

A short teaser for the film leaked last July and later debuted in theaters, but the first full-length trailer for The Odyssey premiered on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on May 4, 2026. The clip conveys the story's texture and, like the great epic, starts with Matt Damon’s Odysseus recounting his life back home to Charlize Theron's Calypso. He recalls his decade-long journey, from helping the Athenians take Troy to navigating treacherous seas and other difficult situations. It hints, though, that the film will focus a great deal more on life back in Odysseus’s home of Ithaca, where his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), have been waiting for him and trying to fend off Antinous (Robert Pattinson) from taking everything Odysseus has.

There’s also some strong evidence here that The Odyssey will simply be Nolan’s most Dad-friendly film yet. When Pattinson’s Antinous threatens to replace Odysseus as the master of the home, Holland’s Telemachus tells him with a shaky voice: “My dad is coming home.”

Watch the first Odyssey trailer below:

Who is in the cast of The Odyssey?

Some of the biggest names in Hollywood are part of Nolan’s film, including Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, Robert Pattinson as Odysseus’s rival and Penelope’s suitor Antinous, Zendaya as the goddess Athena, Charlize Theron as the sea witch Calypso, Jon Bernthal as Spartan king Menelaus, Benny Safdie as Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, Mia Goth as the maidservant Melantho, John Leguizamo as Odysseus’s friend Eumaeus, and Himesh Patel as the Odysseus’s second-in-command Eurylochus.

Those are just the ones whose characters have been officially announced, though. The sprawling cast also includes: Elliott Page, Lupita Nyong’o, Logan Marshall-Green, and Travis Scott, to name a few.

Who has worked together before?

The film marks several creative reunions, including for Nolan and Hathaway, who starred in 2014’s Interstellar (along with Matt Damon) and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. Pattinson has also worked with the director, starring in 2020’s Tenet.

The Odyssey is the second of three movies starring Pattinson and Zendaya releasing this year, which also includes The Drama and Dune: Part Three. It’ll also bring Zendaya and partner Tom Holland back to the screen for the first time since 2012’s Spider-Man: No Way Home (their fourth Spider-Man installation, Brand New Day, arrives in theaters on July 31).

How will The Odyssey film diverge from the original saga?

There have been several films and TV series that draw inspiration from the foundational myth of The Odyssey. Kirk Douglas starred in a popular Italian version of the story in 1954’s Ulysses, and the Coen brothers’s 2000 musical-comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? put George Clooney in the Odysseus role on a satirical journey through the American South (and included a folk-revival soundtrack that won the Grammy for Album of the Year). Nolan’s epic is closer to a faithful adaptation of Homer’s 8th-century BC epic, though it seems life back in Ithaca, with Holland’s Telemachus and Hathaway’s Penelope warding off Pattinson’s Antinous, will get significant screentime in addition to Damon’s long journey home as Odysseus, where he’ll battle mythical creatures like Cyclops and sirens.

What has Christopher Nolan said about the film?

It’s fitting that a director known for his massive-scale filmmaking would take on history’s great epic, and Nolan brought his characteristic sense of grandeur to the 91-day shoot. He told Empire magazine that they show over two million feet of film (The Odyssey is the first feature film in history to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX film cameras).

Much of that shoot occurred on the open ocean, which he called “vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift. We really 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.”

Of his decision to shoot in such physical conditions, he added: “By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways. Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

He also told Colbert on The Late Show that The Odyssey was the original Marvel movie, saying: “Even comic book culture, whether you’re talking about Marvel or D.C. or all the rest, a lot of it comes directly from the Homeric Epics. The thing about Homer is, nobody knows if that was a person. Homer, in a way, is the sort of George Lucas of his time.”

When is the release date for The Odyssey?

The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026.