For decades Christopher Nolan has had Hollywood at his beck and call. A twisted Batman? The dream thriller Inception? Matthew McConaughey going Interstellar? Huge budgets have reaped huge rewards, with Nolan’s most recent film, Oppenheimer, his most singular to date. Who else could craft a three-hour time warp about physics and turn it into a bombastic triumph, nabbing seven Oscars and almost $1 billion?
Nolan is an anomaly, a licence for studio execs to put that deposit on a beach house. So one can only imagine their shock when Nolan said that he wanted to follow Oppenheimer with an adaptation of The Odyssey, and that he needed an estimated $250 million. A poem from the 7th century BC, panicked suits must have cried: who’s going to be interested in that?
Everyone, it turns out. Nolan’s The Odyssey is not out until July 17, 2026, but when 26 Imax cinemas worldwide put tickets online last month, 95 per cent of seats were reportedly snapped up within an hour. All showings at the two venues in London are booked up, with tickets going on eBay for hundreds more than face value.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer won seven Oscars in 2024, including best picture and director
SCOTT KIRKLAND/GETTY IMAGES
“I can’t think of anything like this,” says Phil Clapp, chief executive of the UK Cinema Association. “Typically, films go on sale one to two months early so this speaks to the anticipation there is for a Nolan film. Also, I’m not saying a film about a nuclear physicist is the easiest sell, but a movie based on a Greek fable is probably even tougher — so this gets people talking.”
The Odyssey is the epic story of Odysseus’s decade-long journey home after the Trojan War. It is full of shipwrecks and monsters — and Nolan has gathered an all-star cast, with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Tom Holland as his son Telemachus. Other A-listers include Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o.
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As yet, only a teaser trailer has been released, in which we see Holland speaking at a table. “I have to find out what happened to my father,” he says, to which his companion replies: “Who has a story about Odysseus? Some said he perished. Some said he’s imprisoned.” So little is known about the film — not even how long it is as it is still being shot — that cinemas were able to sell only one screening a day. Nolan is still shooting, and recently ran into controversy for filming scenes in a disputed area of the Western Sahara.
Daniel Mendelsohn is an author and essayist, who in April published a new translation of The Odyssey, a story he believes still resonates not just because it is a vast adventure, but also because it is about homecoming, a theme we all respond to.
“Nolan might be the perfect person to direct,” he says. “I know some academics raised an eyebrow, but he is a visually spectacular director. Also, The Odyssey has an odd structure — it moves back and forth and it’s hard to figure out where you are, which is like Nolan.”
It really is. You expect sci-fi works like Inception and Tenet, or Nolan’s memory maze breakthrough Memento, to jump about in time, but the director played about with chronology even in his otherwise conventional war drama, Dunkirk.
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What, I ask Mendelsohn, is he most looking forward to seeing up on screen? “The most crucial thing is to convey the horror of being wrecked at sea,” he says, of one of Odysseus’ many trials. “All the other stuff is fun, Scylla and Charybdis and the Cyclops — but we’re straying into fantasy there. By far the most terrifying thing was being lost at sea, because it means you’re erased totally. I am really looking forward to seeing what Nolan does with a shipwreck.”
And what is he most worried about? “The greatest danger whenever people tackle canonical works is that it gets stuffy,” Mendelsohn says. “I am praying Nolan won’t do that, because The Odyssey is, for all its adventures, a really intimate epic. I’m just praying he doesn’t get cowed by the greatness of his material.”
Zoe Saldana in Avatar: Fire and Ash. The sequel is expected to be another major box office success
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One thing he’s not concerned about is the accuracy of various weapons and ships, something that has exercised a scroll of classicist nerds on Reddit since a photo of Damon came out. “I want to be super-emphatic about this,” Mendelsohn says. “The Odyssey was composed over generations and so to complain about its accuracy is to show a profound lack of understanding of what it is. There are films that got all the details right, from clothes to hairstyles, like Oliver Stone’s Alexander, but completely missed the point of the story they were telling. I just want a movie that feels like The Odyssey.”
Only a year to wait, then — with cinema chains hoping that recent upturns in box-office revenue continue into 2026, even if there is still work to do. “Nobody is complacent,” Clapp says about this year’s cinema admissions. “Whether the audience is young, middle-aged or old, cinemas are having to work doubly hard to get people through the door and we’re still down on pre-pandemic levels by a significant margin. Still, at the end of June we were 13 per cent up on admissions from 2024 and the second half of the year is looking strong.” Incoming big hitters include Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire and Ash, sequels that should make something close to £1 billion each worldwide. “So it’s a slow recovery, but definitely a recovery.”
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Then comes Nolan. As yet no other films are slated for release next July 17, but surely rival distributors will be eyeing up the date in the hope of repeating that heady Barbenheimer weekender two years ago. The early on-sale date has treated Nolan like a rock star and made The Odyssey an event, creating a sense of high demand for something that cannot really sell out, given it will stay in cinemas for months.
There is a serendipity to this too. Years ago Nolan turned down an offer to direct Brad Pitt’s Troy, loosely based on The Iliad. Instead he made Batman Begins, the bold blockbuster that showed Hollywood he could bring in a crowd for the most skewed of ideas. And now here we are, at the end of an odyssey that leads to The Odyssey.
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