CinemaCon Captivated: Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Promises Cinematic History
“We know this film will be a once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would be very proud of,” Jim Orr, Universal Pictures’ president of domestic theatrical distribution, said from the stage of the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on Wednesday at this year’s CinemaCon.
Orr was talking about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, which is currently filming in southern Europe, including on goat island. Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic is the writer/director’s star-studded follow-up to his Oscar-winning biopic Oppenheimer, which managed to turn the life of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, into a riveting, three-hour storytelling masterclass. Taking on Homer’s epic might at first blush feel like the more straightforward cinematic adaptation, but it’s a tale with many inherent challenges, including a motley crew of gods, goddesses, kings, peasants, debaucherous suitors, far-flung locations, and ancient rivalries, none of which Nolan will approach with anything less than his usual meticulous, singular approach.
Orr described Nolan’s film as a “mythic action epic 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.”
Matt Damon stars as the ingenious Odysseus, the mastermind of the victorious Trojan War for the Achaeans against the city of Troy. Yet his trip home to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus on the Greek island of Ithaca is waylaid by vengeful gods and goddesses and becomes a decade-long test of will, endurance, intelligence, and strength. Damon is joined by Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth, Elliot Page, Samantha Morton, and others.
Part of the fun has been trying to determine, outside of Damon’s central hero, who’s playing who. It seems like it might make a lot of sense for someone like Theron to play Circe, the goddess who keeps Odysseus on her island of Aeaea for an entire year after turning his men into pigs, but she could just as easily be playing Penelope, and perhaps Hathaway or Goth or Nyong’o is playing the goddess. Jon Bernthal could make sense as Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant son of Poseidon who eats some of Odysseus’s men, but so, too, could you imagine Safdie or even Pattinson being turned into the Cyclops. You could spend the better portion of your morning moving the cast around into the various roles on offer.
Regardless, any Nolan film is an event film, and taking on one of the most iconic stories ever told makes his The Odyssey one of 2026’s most exciting films.
For more on the action at CinemaCon, check out these stories:
James Gunn’s “Superman” Soars for Warner Bros. at CinemaCon
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Featured image: Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.
