MOVIE NEWS – After the Oscar triumph of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan has turned to Homer’s epic and is not treating it as a modest follow-up. The Odyssey was shot entirely for IMAX, is being assembled through traditional film editing, and is being built with a scale Nolan says had to exceed anything he had attempted before.

Over the course of his career, Christopher Nolan has become one of the few modern directors whose films are routinely treated as genuine big-screen events. His early support for using IMAX film cameras in major blockbusters helped push large-format filmmaking further into mainstream cinema, but scale has never been the only point for him. Nolan has consistently tried to balance technical ambition with narrative structure, whether he was turning a comic book hero into a crime epic, shaping a war film around overlapping timelines, or transforming a biopic into a vast, non-linear historical thriller. After the massive success and Oscar sweep of Oppenheimer, attention has naturally shifted to his next summer release, The Odyssey, which is set to open in US theaters on July 17, 2026.

Speaking during a segment on 60 Minutes, with clips supplied exclusively to Variety, Nolan pulled back the curtain on the editing process for The Odyssey. The film was shot entirely in IMAX, and its post-production is still rooted in a physical, traditional method: IMAX filmstrips are being cut and glued together by hand rather than treated as a purely digital workflow. Nolan also noted that the lab where this work is taking place is the last of its kind, giving the production a distinctly analog dimension. For a film based on one of the foundational works of ancient storytelling, that combination of new technology and old craft feels very deliberate.

“In taking on The Odyssey, it does become about scale. It needed to be the biggest film that we had done. It needed to be challenging for all of us, because that’s the nature of the story” – Nolan said. That scale is not limited to the size of the screen. The film’s practical effects, its use of newly developed IMAX camera technology, and its overall production approach all point toward an adaptation that is meant to be both enormous and technically innovative. Nolan is not simply mounting Homer’s poem as a prestige literary adaptation; he is trying to make a modern theatrical epic that justifies the format it is being shown in.

Setting new technical standards is hardly unusual for Nolan. On Oppenheimer, Kodak had to create a new type of black-and-white film stock for sequences set outside the title character’s perspective, allowing the film’s visual language to serve its structure rather than merely decorate it. That same instinct seems to be driving The Odyssey. Nolan has often matched form to source material: with The Dark Knight trilogy, he leaned into the comic book spectacle of Batman while grounding it in crime cinema, and with The Odyssey, he appears to be responding to the sheer foundational weight of Homer’s text. This is not just another mythological adventure; it is one of the core stories that helped shape the structure, themes, and archetypes of Western storytelling.

That makes Nolan’s insistence on size easier to understand. The Odyssey in IMAX 70 mm is not only a technical showcase, but also a statement about why theatrical viewing still matters. Homer’s epic began as a spoken-word tradition, carried through communal storytelling long before cinema existed, and Nolan’s approach seems to translate that communal scale into modern moviegoing terms. If the film delivers on the promise he is describing, The Odyssey will not simply be the next major Nolan release, but a test of whether the old idea of the theatrical epic can still command the largest screens with real authority.

Source: MovieWeb, Variety, Universal Pictures