Christopher Nolan isn’t wasting any time getting the hype train (or hype raft) on his upcoming adaptation of Odyssey on its way. The movie has already sold out its initial IMAX screenings, and Nolan seems dead set on making it worth it. Speaking to Empire, he shared that he’s “shot 2 million feet of film” during the 91-day shoot, and what he’s shot has been “pretty primal.” The director has pushed his cast out into the open sea so that they could feel “real waves, in the real places,” it’s all in service of restoring a type of film that’s been missing of late: the sword-and-sandal epic.
“As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with—Ray Harryhausen movies and other things—I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”
Now that he mentions it, it has been more than a decade since Wrath Of The Titans. Perhaps audiences got burned out in 2014, when competing Hercules movies no one remembers tore the box office apart. We’ve seen attempts to revive these mythic epics over the years. Last year, we had Gladiator II, which was a legitimate hit, earning more than $460 million globally—although that movie traded Harryhausen’s beloved fighting skeletons for some terrifying baboons. We doubt that there will be any skeletons in Odyssey either, no matter how many letters we send the director demanding that he fill the Trojan Horse with them. Instead, Nolan wants to capture “how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.”
“By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways,” he tells Empire. “Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”
The Odyssey opens July 17, 2026.
