The Odyssey could end up being Christopher Nolan's biggest movie, but in some ways, it's already his most controversial. Online backlash has led to complaints about everything from inaccurate armour and ship designs to the filmmaker's casting choices.
The news that Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong'o would play Helen of Troy didn't sit well with some—including X owner Elon Musk—and more fuel was added to the fire when it was reported that transgender actor Elliot Page had been tapped for the role of Sinon.
The Odyssey has since been labelled "woke," and the final trailer has a massive 600,000 "dislikes" on YouTube. Does it bother Nolan?
"Comes with the territory," he told The Telegraph (via SFFGazette.com) with a grin. "But look, these conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet."
"But remember," Nolan continued, "I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman. When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents."
"And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can," he explained, revealing how reimagining the DC Comics character was similar to how he approached The Odyssey.
"In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could," Nolan continued. "All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is."
For Nolan, delivering a take on The Odyssey that did right by Homer's seminal poem was a priority. "There was, of course, all of that brilliant work by people like Ray Harryhausen on films like Clash of the Titans," he told the site. "But he was always working on tiny B-movie budgets."
"They just didn’t have the technology to pull off the fantasy elements on the scale of Cleopatra or Spartacus," Nolan noted. "So I had always seen that as a tremendous opportunity."
Elsewhere in the piece, it's mentioned that The Odyssey is not Nolan's most expensive movie. That remains 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, but this fantasy epic did still cost a whopping $250 million to produce. Throw in the usual $100 million for marketing, and this needs to be one of the biggest hits of the summer if it hopes to turn a profit.
The cast of The Odyssey includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal, Mia Goth, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Lupita Nyong'o, Will Yun Lee, Benny Safdie, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Corey Hawkins, Josh Stewart, Jimmy Gonzales, Maurice Compte, and Logan Marshall-Green.
Shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology, the film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.