Production on writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, based on Homer's epic Greek poem, has been wrapped. The other day, Empire published some exclusive photographs from the film and a key artwork, giving the audience a glimpse of what to expect from Nolan. The filmmaker also gave the magazine some exclusive details about the epic, including those pertaining to its scale. He revealed that he made more than "two million feet of film" at the time of production, a lot of which took place at the ocean, to match the grandiose of Homer's epic.
“It’s pretty primal! I’ve been out on it for the last four months," Nolan told Empire. He went on to add, "We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, it’s 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."
The film chronicles King of Ithaca, Odysseus' (Matt Damon) perilous journey back home following the Trojan War. As he travels to meet his spouse Penelope, Odysseus comes across mythical creatures and other trials and tribulations. Nolan was in line to do Troy, based on another Homer poem (Iliad), but he ended up directing Batman Begins instead. For him, the Odyssey adaptation marks a long wait for a period epic. "As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before,” Nolan shared. “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."
Also starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, and Robert Pattinson, among others, The Odyssey is slated for a July 17, 2026, release. It is a lucky window for Nolan, having seen the releases of his films such as The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer.
