This story contains spoilers for The Odyssey, a 2,700-year-old epic poem, and potentially for the forthcoming movie adaptation of that poem.
The shore is in sight: We are less than two months from being seated for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in glorious 70-millimeter IMAX. Since last summer, we’ve had little to go on except a poster and a trailer, both fairly opaque in classic Nolan fashion. But on May 12, the maestro showed up on the cover of Time and info-dumped a few additional morsels of information regarding his thirteenth feature film, in a story that also resolves a few lingering casting mysteries.
Let’s go over all the information we currently have on the film, from the actors confirmed to be part of The Odyssey‘s cast to the ways in which the movie might deviate from its hallowed source material.
What is The Odyssey About?
Ivy Close Images/Getty Images
After eight months of post-Oscar rumors flying concerning what Nolan’s next project might be (RIP, at least for now, to the dream of a Chris Nolan helicopter-cops movie), The Odyssey was announced in late December 2024. From there, things picked up steam rapidly. The Odyssey‘s cast was announced in spurts throughout the spring, and members of that massive all-star ensemble began flying out to shoot on location in Morocco, Sicily, Ireland and Scotland. Nolan shot the film—with Hoyte van Hoytema, his go-to cinematographer since 2014’s Interstellar—in 91 days (nine ahead of schedule) on over two million feet of film, entirely with IMAX cameras (for the first time). This required technology that has been updated for the first time in decades, with a sound suppressing device referred to as a blimp around the physical camera.
The film is obviously an adaptation of Homer’s classics-major classic, in which Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, tries to make his way home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after the Trojan War in 8th century BCE. The Odyssey has been mounted many times on the large and small screen, faithfully and playfully, as an Armand Assante-starring Hallmark miniseries, and by everyone from Walter Hill in the ’70s (as The Warriors, with Manhattan gangs instead of Greek soldiers) to the Coen Brothers in the 2000s and 2010s twice (with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Inside Llewyn Davis).
Nolan has some experience with adaptations—both with his Dark Knight trilogy and Oppenheimer, a faithful take on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book American Prometheus—but has generally stuck to telling original stories, which makes taking on one of the most widely-read and foundational narratives in human history a somewhat surprising left turn from a career master of subverting expectation. Unless it isn’t.