Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Trailer Is Here—and Yes, It’s Insane
Nolan’s $250-million retelling of Homer’s epic arrives with darkness, storms, and a Cyclops
There are trailers, and then there are events.
The first official trailer for The Odyssey—Christopher Nolan’s long-rumoured, obsessively speculated, capital-E Epic—falls firmly into the latter category.
If you happened to be in an IMAX theatre recently for Avatar: Fire and Ash, you may have already glimpsed a five-minute prologue: Nolan showing, unapologetically, on the biggest screens possible. For everyone else, today’s online drop is the formal announcement. The king has returned, and he’s brought Cyclopes with him.
This is Nolan’s follow-up to Oppenheimer. Now, for his next move, he’s gone back—way back—to Homer’s Odyssey, one of the oldest stories we still tell ourselves, and decided it needs to be shot entirely on IMAX film. Because of course, if not Nolan, who else is capable of this?
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The result, judging by this first trailer, is vast, wet, thunderous, and deeply serious about its own scale. A prestige myth. A dad-movie fever dream.
A $250-million reminder that Nolan remains one of the few directors who can still make Hollywood bend around his particular brand of excess.
What We’re Watching, Exactly
At its core, The Odyssey follows Odysseus, King of Ithaca, as he attempts to return home after the Trojan War—a journey that takes ten years, involves gods, monsters, hubris, and a frankly unreasonable amount of maritime trauma. In Nolan’s hands, this becomes less a wandering poem and more a sustained endurance test.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, weathered, hollow-eyed, and already radiating the kind of exhausted gravitas Nolan loves to explore. His voice anchors the trailer with one of its few spoken lines: “After years of war, no one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.” It’s blunt. It’s very Nolan.
Back in Ithaca, Penelope—played by Anne Hathaway—waits, while their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) grows up without his father. The emotional stakes are simple and classical: get home, or be forgotten. Nolan doesn’t overcomplicate the premise. He is clearly monumentalising it.
The Trailer Breakdown
True to form, the trailer is light on dialogue and heavy on implication. We get sweeping shots of oceans that look actively hostile, ships splintering under divine tantrums, and men reduced to silhouettes against impossible horizons. Everything looks physical. Cold. Real.
There’s the Trojan Horse—huge, ominous, framed less as a clever trick than a looming moral failure. There are battle sequences glimpsed in fragments, all mud and bronze and chaos. And yes, there is a Cyclops. One eye. Massive scale. Emerging from a cave like a myth waking up. Reports suggest Nolan used animatronics rather than full CGI, which tracks with his ongoing vendetta against anything that looks too digital.
The camera fetishism is unmistakable. Shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, The Odyssey is being billed as the first feature to commit to the format end-to-end. This isn’t a gimmick; it’s Nolan staking a claim. Cinema, he’s saying—again—should be overwhelming. It should tower over you. And it’s making us feel exactly that.
The Cast of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
If Nolan does one thing consistently well, it’s getting an ensemble that is predictably stacked.
Alongside Damon, Hathaway, and Holland, the film features Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth, and John Leguizamo. Many are absent from this first look, which feels intentional. Nolan loves a slow reveal.
Theron is reportedly playing Circe. Pattinson, fresh off his Tenet redemption arc, remains an unknown quantity here. Zendaya and Nyong’o’s roles are similarly under wraps as well.
Why This Matters
On paper, The Odyssey is a prestige play: classical source material, auteur director, marquee cast, summer release. But it also feels like a philosophical sequel to Oppenheimer. Where that film interrogated legacy, guilt, and the cost of brilliance, The Odyssey seems poised to ask a simpler, older question: what happens to a man after the war is over?
Nolan has always been obsessed with time, memory, and moral consequence. Odysseus—a hero defined as much by his cleverness as his cruelty—is fertile ground. If we go by the trailer, it’s a myth treated with the seriousness of history.
The Odyssey arrives on July 17, 2026, planted firmly in the heart of blockbuster season. It’s distributed by Universal Pictures and produced by Nolan and Emma Thomas under Syncopy. The budget—reportedly around $250 million—puts it among the most expensive films of Nolan’s career.
Will it be divisive? Almost certainly. Nolan’s seriousness tends to polarise. Will it be overwhelming in IMAX? Undoubtedly.
But if this trailer is any indication, The Odyssey won’t be subtle, small, or forgettable.
Well, the gods are watching. And so, apparently, are we.