The Odyssey Explained: Nolan's IMAX Gamble, the Records It Broke, and What to Watch First

The film itself: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena and Robert Pattinson in support. It opened on 17 July to $124.5 million from 3,919 domestic cinemas and $139.6 million from 73 international markets — a $264.1 million global debut, the biggest of Nolan's career — and has since passed $1.12 billion to become his highest-grossing film ever. Universal sold IMAX tickets a year in advance and premiered a six-minute extended trailer only inside 70mm IMAX screenings, never online. Everything about the release was built on scarcity, and the scarcity was real: it is the first feature shot entirely with IMAX 70mm film cameras, and barely two dozen American screens can show it that way.

Start here for the format story. This is the first narrative feature to use IMAX cameras at all — six sequences, roughly 28 minutes, beginning with the bank robbery that opens the film. Everything Nolan has done with the format in the eighteen years since starts from the discovery that the cameras were too loud to record dialogue against, which is why those first IMAX sequences are almost entirely action.

The step up: over an hour shot in IMAX, and the film where the format stops being reserved for spectacle and starts carrying quiet scenes. The docking sequence is the one people cite, but the reason The Odyssey could exist is the cornfield — proof that a 70mm IMAX frame could hold something small.

The closest structural rehearsal for The Odyssey: 106 minutes, most of it shot in IMAX, almost no dialogue, and a story told through three timelines that converge. It is the film that established Nolan could sell a formally difficult, star-light historical picture as an event, which is precisely the pitch The Odyssey needed nine years later.

The immediate predecessor, and the film that made the year-ahead IMAX ticket sales plausible. It was shot largely in IMAX including, for the first time, black-and-white IMAX film stock that Kodak manufactured specially — the same relationship with the format's physical limits that produced the custom cameras built for The Odyssey. It also proved a three-hour R-rated drama could take $975 million.

The one to watch for how far Nolan will push a format against comprehensibility. Tenet's sound mix buries dialogue under score by deliberate choice, and its reputation never recovered. Worth revisiting before The Odyssey specifically because the new film is the corrective: three hours of a story everyone already knows, told plainly.

The other half of the story, literally. Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film adapts the Iliad — the war that The Odyssey's hero spends ten years coming home from — and Sean Bean plays Odysseus in it. It takes enormous liberties and the gods are absent entirely, but it is the most watchable version of the Trojan War on film and it sets up everything Nolan's picture assumes you know.

The Coen brothers' 2000 Depression-era comedy is credited on screen as being based on Homer's Odyssey, and it is the most inventive adaptation anyone has made of it — sirens, a cyclops, a hero named Ulysses Everett McGill trying to get home to a wife with suitors. Watching it next to Nolan's version is the fastest way to see how elastic the source is.

Included for context rather than kinship. It opened two weeks after The Odyssey, took the biggest domestic weekend in history, and shares two cast members — Tom Holland is Telemachus in one and Peter Parker in the other, and Zendaya is Athena in one and MJ in the other. Between the two films each of them is attached to over $2.8 billion of 2026 box office, which is a fair claim to the strangest fortnight any actor has had.