Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odysseystars Matt Damon as Odysseus and features an all-star cast.
The film, with a US$250 million budget, will use next-generation Imax cameras for enhanced visuals.
Filming will take place in authentic locations, with a focus on practical effects and historical detail.
Amidst the usual plethora of sequels, superhero movies and remakes that nobody asked for (yes, we’re looking at you, Masters of the Universe), 2026 has at least one genuinely anticipated picture in its midst.
It is none other than the recently knighted film director Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of Homer’sThe Odyssey.
It has already quietly started filming and the first picture of its star, Matt Damon, has been released by its production company Universal Pictures.
While it’s too early to infer much from a single image, a scarred and helmeted Damon looks suitably grizzled and world-weary as the trickster-warrior Odysseus.
The King of Ithaca is condemned to spend a decade travelling home from the Trojan wars to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after managing to displease the decidedly capricious gods with his actions during the war.
There is an awful lot riding on The Odyssey, not least its rumoured US$250 million ($438m) budget.
Nolan set the bar very high with his previous picture Oppenheimer, which grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide despite being, on the face of it, the least likely subject for a blockbuster imaginable.
Christopher Nolan will be directing the ambitious The Odyssey. Photo / Getty Images
Nolan’s new picture – based on a work that has never received the full Hollywood treatment, despite being one of the most famous and foundational stories ever told – is regarded with feverish anticipation.
However, the box office disappointment (admittedly Covid-induced) of the similarly ambitious Tenet revealed that even the most successful film-maker working today can have a miss.
The sword and sandals genre isn’t quite at the commercial peak it once was, with even Gladiator II underwhelming at the box office. So Universal will be hoping that Nolan, plus Homer, plus the cast of dreams, equals an epic that will endure for decades to come.
What can we expect, and why should we be excited?
As ever with Nolan, actors queue up to work with the director (perhaps because of his much-heralded “no mobile phones on set” policy), and The Odyssey is no exception, featuring a vast, all-star ensemble with more celebs than an Oscar night party.
Several veterans from his previous films are returning, including three-time collaborators Damon and Anne Hathaway, but he’s also packed the cast with lots of interesting names and faces.
They range from the A-list likes of Hollywood’s “It” couple Tom Holland and Zendaya, to the always dependable Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, and Lupita Nyong’o.
Tom Holland and Zendaya are set to star in The Odyssey. Photo / Getty Images
There are plenty of Nolan veterans returning, from Elliot Page and Bill Irwin to Himesh Patel and Benny Safdie, and some intriguing newbies, too, including the excellent Samantha Morton, Mia Goth, and Jon Bernthal.
The question remains as to who’s going to be playing who.
It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to assume that Holland’s going to be Telemachus and it’s fairly likely that Hathaway will be Penelope, but no further details from the cast have been announced yet, which raises the intriguing question as to who, if anyone, has been cast as the gods.
Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, an adaptation of The Iliad, dealt with the potentially tricky issue of representing the deities by simply not showing them on screen at all, but it’s likely that Nolan, who is a far less literal film-maker than Petersen, will embrace the metaphysical aspects of the story.
Charlize Theron as Athena? Zendaya as Circe? Both perfectly possible; all will doubtless be revealed soon.
It’s a shame that Nolan veterans Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy and Kenneth Branagh haven’t found a berth, but who knows what might be on offer when it comes to voicing the various inhabitants of Mt Olympus.
The Odyssey cast so far:
(Previous Nolan credits in brackets)
Matt Damon as Odysseus (Oppenheimer, Interstellar)
Tom Holland
Zendaya
Robert Pattinson (Tenet)
Mia Goth
Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar)
Jon Bernthal
Charlize Theron
Mia Goth
Elliot Page (Inception)
Lupita Nyong’o
Samantha Morton
John Leguizamo
Will Yun Lee
Benny Safdie (Oppenheimer)
Bill Irwin (Interstellar)
Corey Hawkins
Himesh Patel (Tenet)
Nick E. Tarabay
Who’s behind the camera?
Nolan has dealt with the departure of two of his closest collaborators, cinematographer Wally Pfister and composer Hans Zimmer, by finding replacements who have since won Oscars for their work on his pictures.
Hoyte van Hoytema, who has shot all Nolan’s films since Interstellar, was deservedly recognised for his stunning work on Oppenheimer, and Ludwig Göransson took the Oscar for his similarly memorable score.
Both return for The Odyssey, as has costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who was Oscar-nominated for Oppenheimer but who should have an opportunity to create more flamboyant designs here that might cleave closer to her work for The Greatest Showman or Bridgerton than the rather more buttoned-up threads of Nolan’s last picture.
It goes without saying, of course, that the key behind-the-scenes collaborator on any Nolan film is his wife and producer, Emma Thomas – given a damehood at the same time that her husband was knighted – and she will be returning for her 13th picture with him.
And Nolan’s decision to remain with Universal, who granted him an unprecedented degree of creative control with Oppenheimer and reaped the benefits accordingly, will be a blow to the beleaguered David Zaslav and Warner Brothers, who were the director’s go-to studio for years until he fell out with them over their decision to put all of their pictures on streaming services at the same time as their theatrical release.
Will it be filmed in Imax?
Silly question, really. Years ago, Nolan was once asked in an interview (presumably facetiously) whether he’d ever abandon the huge-scale epics that he’s become synonymous with and direct a small-scale romantic comedy instead.
He replied: “I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is. I know that there are so many film-makers out there in the world who would give their eyeteeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.”
Nolan was one of the first film-makers to eschew the then-modish 3D format in favour of using Imax cameras, which he believed captured a level of spectacle that squinting through a pair of coloured plastic glasses did not, and every film of his since has gone to ever-greater lengths to offer audiences something new and thrilling.
Imax has been using the same cameras for the past 25 years, and while they are capable of producing stunning images, Nolan has yet to make an entire film using them, not least because it would be almost impossible from a practical perspective. Oppenheimer, for instance, used 75 minutes of Imax over its three-hour length.
However, Bruce Markoe, head of post-production at Imax, has revealed that The Odyssey will be the first film to use their next-generation cameras, which will be quieter and lighter than the existing ones.
Given that a common criticism of Nolan’s films is that the dialogue can be near-inaudible thanks to the director’s refusal to use post-production dubbing or ADR (automated dialogue replacement), this is welcome news.
Where will it be filmed?
Not to keep beating poor Wolfgang Petersen up, but when he filmed Troy two decades ago, he didn’t bother to head to the Aegean coast of Turkey, which is the closest equivalent to the ancient city.
Instead, he went to the usual rent-an-epic spots of Malta and Mexico, as well as filming studio interiors in Britain. Nolan may have followed his lead in the latter regard, and Malta will come into play too, but he is vastly more interested in authenticity than Petersen ever was.
To this end, The Odyssey will be filmed in the original locations that Homer had in mind, including Favignana in Sicily that Odysseus and his men were said to have stopped at to replenish their supplies and cook and sacrifice some goats, and Voidokilia Beach in Greece, where Telemachus was welcomed by King Nestor.
There will inevitably be a giddy thrill in seeing these obscure, remote locations on screen, looking much as they might have done thousands of years ago: the idea of being able to visualise them in screen-filling Imax glory is incredibly exciting.
Which translation is Nolan using?
As is now usually the case with Nolan, the screenplay is solely credited to him, rather than with his previous collaborator, his brother and Westworld creator Jonathan.
Yet there has been a lot of interest in which translation of Homer’s original the director is going to be using. After all, although every English-language version of the saga contains the same characters, events, and resolution, some of the more traditional versions of The Odyssey have as little in common with contemporary translations as a 17th-century poem has with present-day language.
Perhaps the most notable recent translation of the epic is by Emily Wilson, who also published an acclaimed version of The Iliad in 2023. Wilson’s translation – the first by a woman – came out in 2017, and Edith Hall wrote in the Daily Telegraph that “Wilson captures The Odyssey’s tonal variety, from magical realism to comedy to despair”.
Yet the greater scrutiny that it has now received has not been without controversy. It is written in iambic pentameter rather than the more commonly used form of dactylic hexameter, and eschews some of the poetic grandiosity of well-known translators such as TE Lawrence and Robert Fagles in favour of plainer, more colloquial language.
Favignana, Sicily, where Christopher Nolan will be filming The Odyssey. Photo / Getty Images
“I wanted to bring out the potential,” Wilson has said. “There’s more than one voice. There’s more than one character. Each of the characters is vivid, well-rounded, and has their own different perspective in the narrative. It’s not as Odysseus-centric as some translations might make you think.”
Given the vastness of Nolan’s ensemble cast, with a lot of A-list actors wanting their time in the spotlight, it is tempting to imagine that he has either used Wilson’s version as his basis for the screenplay, or at the very least is well aware of its complexities and nuances.
Will it be historically accurate?
Nolan seems to have a penchant for directing films set in the past.
After Oppenheimer, The Prestige and Dunkirk, The Odyssey marks the fourth large-scale period piece that he has made, and, like the others, it will be carefully pored over for any perceived inaccuracies in historical detail.
Already, the image of Damon in his armour has attracted criticism. Odysseus lived (and fought) in Bronze Age Greece, where he would have worn elaborate bronze Mycenean-era battle attire, rather than the less ornate Hoplite-esque armour that he is shown wearing in the first picture, which would be more suited to an ordinary soldier rather than the King of Ithaca.
And the helmet that he’s wearing, with its red-tinged horsehair bristles, is historically accurate enough but far less exciting than one he is described as being given in The Iliad by his friend Meriones.
“About his head he set a helm wrought of hide, and with many a tight-stretched thong was it made stiff within, while without the white teeth of a boar of gleaming tusks were set thick on this side and that, well and cunningly, and within was fixed a lining of felt. “
Come on, Sir Christopher, let’s see Damon with his boar’s teeth helmet on his head – it’ll be far more visually striking.
Will there be monsters?
There are many indelible characters and moments in The Odyssey, including the final bloody reckoning that Odysseus has with the suitors who have been abusing his and Penelope’s hospitality during his absence.
That was turned into a recent stand-alone film, The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, which is an adaptation solely of the final few books of the poem.
There’s also the episode in which Odysseus is seduced by the enchantress Circe, who duly turns his sailors into pigs.
Yet the most famous scene of all is surely the episode in which the hapless adventurer is captured by the one-eyed and bloodthirsty Cyclops Polyphemus, who proceeds to devour Odysseus’ men while promising that he will leave him for last.
Most film-makers would choose to render the character with CGI, but Nolan remains a stickler for authenticity.
The Cyclops scenes are supposedly being filmed in Nestor’s Cave and Voidokilia Beach in Greece – themselves fair representations of what the original Homeric locale would have looked like.
Polyphemus himself will be brought to life on screen by a vast mechanical puppet, supposedly measuring 6m-high. Undoubtedly there will be some kind of special effects wizardry going on, and it’s likely that one of the well-known cast will be offering some kind of motion capture and vocal talents for the character.
Nolan’s dedication to offering as realistic an account of the fantastical as possible is yet another indication as to why, precisely, we’re so excited about what should be another eye-popping odyssey into the unknown.
