A new Christopher Nolan movie is always a Capital E Event. The Batman Begins and Oppenheimer director is unarguably the most acclaimed and popular director on the planet right now. He’s a bold visionary, and we’re not tossing that term around lightly, as certain marketing departments are wont to do. But for his next film, he’s undertaking his most ambitious project yet—a brand new cinematic take on one of the oldest stories in human culture: Homer’s The Odyssey (well, it’s possibly Homer’s, but it’s definitely The Odyssey).
But we’ve got an epic wait ahead of us, gang. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hits Australian cinemas on July 16, 2026.
But it’ll be worth it; we’re reasonably confident in that regard. Starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, King of Ithaca circa 1200-1300 and coming hot on the heels of the events of The Iliad (that’d be the 10-year-long Trojan War), The Odyssey follows the Greek hero’s decade-long…uh…odyssey to return home to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, after years of flinging himself at the walls of Troy and, ultimately, building a big horse. Unfortunately, Odysseus has angered the sea god Poseidon, and so it takes him 10 years (to be fair, seven of those were spent captured by the sea nymph Calypso, which tends to get brushed over).
There’s more to it than that (among other things, it turns out Helen of Troy got back together with King Menelaus, which is a bit of a bummer), and it’ll be interesting to see how Nolan, who’s also on scripting duties, adapts the epic poem. One thing we do know is that this isn’t going to be a dry, “historical” take on the material, ala Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy. At the bare minimum we know that the Cyclops Polyphemus is showing up, so hopefully we’ll get a full panoply of sirens, cannibals, the odd ghost, and men turning into pigs (classical mythology is wild, folks).
We also know that the former Will Hunting is heading up a top notch cast populated with a fair whack of Nolan regulars, although there’s been no word at the time of writing as to who they’re playing. But let’s hazard a few guesses just for the exercise, hey?
Tom Holland is almost certainly playing Telemachus; Anne Hathaway is probably Penelope; Zendaya seems like a good fit for Nausicaa (not that one); Lupita Nyong’o might make a decent Calypso; Charlize Theron ought to be Helen, for fairly obvious reasons; if Mia Goth is playing anyone but the witch-goddess Circe somebody screwed up; Achilles shows up as a ghost, so let’s pop Robert Pattinson in there; ol’ beetle-browed Jon Bernthal may not be playing Polyphemus, but he should be; and it all gets a bit hazy from there. But expect to see Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Will Yun Lee, Rafi Gavron, Shiloh Fernandez, Corey Hawkins, Nick E. Tarabay, Jimmy Gonzales, Maurice Compte, Michael Vlamis, and Iddo Goldberg as various sailors, suitors, gods, monsters, and what-have-you.
Depending, of course, on how Nolan adapts the source material. There’s a number of possible approaches, with various degrees of fidelity. Your guess is as good as ours; we don’t even have a trailer yet! But what we do have is the entirety of the the three hour 1997 miniseries starring Armand Assante, and that’ll have to hold you for now.
