Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Drops a Jaw-Dropping New Trailer Featuring the Cyclops, a Scheming Pattinson, and the IMAX Event of 2026
When Christopher Nolan finished ‘Oppenheimer’ and walked away with seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, the immediate question from every corner of the film world was the same: what comes next. After winning those Oscars in March 2024, Nolan began writing the script for his follow-up, and within months had set the project up directly at Universal Pictures with a release date already locked in. That project turned out to be something no one could have predicted from Hollywood’s most meticulous filmmaker.
‘The Odyssey’ is Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem, and from the moment its cast was announced, it became clear this would be unlike anything he had attempted before. Matt Damon leads the film as Odysseus, with Tom Holland taking the role of Telemachus, alongside Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, Benny Safdie, and Samantha Morton. Filming took place from February to August 2025 across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara, and Malta, with an estimated budget of $250 million making it the most expensive film of Nolan’s career.
The newest trailer, which arrived on May 4 and debuted on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,’ pulls the curtain back considerably further than the teaser footage released last December. The latest glimpse into the world of Homer’s Greek epic shows Damon’s Odysseus doing battle with the Cyclops, while Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous schemes to take the throne of Ithaca in the king’s absence.
According to the official synopsis, fathers and sons, myth and legacy, are woven throughout Nolan’s new action epic, and the trailer makes clear that the emotional spine of this journey is every bit as important to the director as its spectacular visuals. Before the trailer debuted on ‘The Late Show,’ Nolan spoke about why ‘The Odyssey’ became his next film, citing not only how deeply Homer’s poem has shaped Western storytelling, but the fact that the story has never been adapted as a big-budget studio blockbuster before.
The film is Nolan’s first to be shot entirely on IMAX’s 70mm film cameras, making it the first narrative feature in history to achieve that distinction. New IMAX technology was developed specifically for this production, and Nolan revealed that he and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot over two million feet of film, including four months spent filming on the open ocean. The scope is staggering by any standard.
The first trailer, released in December 2025, accumulated 121.4 million global views within 24 hours, surpassing the trailer views for ‘Wicked: For Good’ and more than doubling the first ‘Oppenheimer’ trailer’s numbers in the same window. Variety has predicted that ‘The Odyssey’ could surpass both ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ to become Nolan’s highest-grossing film ever, with TheWrap echoing similar projections based on record-breaking early ticket pre-sales.
The film shares its July 17 release date with Disney and Sony’s ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day,’ setting up one of the most competitive summer showdowns in recent memory, with both Holland and Zendaya appearing in each film simultaneously. Whether you are coming for the mythology, the spectacle, or simply because it is the next Christopher Nolan film, the question now is which element of this new trailer, the Cyclops battle, Pattinson’s scheming Antinous, or Theron’s haunting Calypso, has you most convinced that ‘The Odyssey’ is worth lining up for on opening night.
