Whether The Odyssey ends up being the biggest hit of the summer remains to be seen. However, there's a very good chance that filmmaker Christopher Nolan's fantasy tale will, regardless of box office, be the year's most epic blockbuster to grace screens when it opens next month.
No stranger to making movies best enjoyed in theaters, Nolan has previously taken us to Gotham City in The Dark Knight Trilogy and turned the creation of the atom bomb into an edge-of-your-seat experience with Oppenheimer.
The Odyssey, on the other hand, is set to be pure spectacle, and it will find Matt Damon's Odysseus facing off with more than his fair share of deadly enemies. Among them are the Laestrygonians, massive giants who were brought to life on screen with forced-perspective illusions and some impressive wirework that sees Odysseus's men flung around like ragdolls.
"It was a fun sequence to shoot," Nolan told Empire Online (via SFFGazette.com) during an on-set interview. "It’s really a thing of trying to get across the brutality. They’re warriors, and their weapons and armour is of a level of sophistication that Odysseus has never seen."
"The point of the Laestrygonians in the story, as in the original poem, is to show in some ways the questionable nature of Odysseus’ leadership. To give his men reason to doubt him," the director explains. "And so what they come up against leaves them all shaken."
The site has also shared four new magazine covers for The Odyssey. Those put the spotlight on Damon's Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, his wife, and Tom Holland as Telemachus, their son. There's also a subscriber-only cover illustrated by Paul Shipper.
We also have some new stills from the movie, and comments from Hathaway about what her character brings to the table as she awaits her husband's return.
"There’s a way to think about her that she is just kind of passively, quietly waiting," the actress muses. "But I didn’t see her like that. I saw her as this incredible, active, ride-or-die partner. I wanted her to have a sense of danger to her. That she’s not doing this out of a sense of duty — she genuinely loves [Odysseus] with her whole fiery soul."
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.