Christopher Nolan’s next film has been revealed as an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey that will use “brand new IMAX film technology.”
Universal Pictures, the studio behind the upcoming movie, announced the project in a social media post late Monday afternoon, effectively ending months of speculation as to what the storyline would be.
“Christopher Nolan’s next film The Odyssey is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology,” the studio tweeted. “The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theatres everywhere on July 17, 2026.”
Along with Matt Damon, with whom Nolan worked on Interstellar and last year’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, the film is also set to star Tom Holland, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron.
Nolan has also worked with Hathaway before (on The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar) as well as Pattinson (on Tenet).
Released in 750-650 BC, Homer’s ancient text follows Greek hero Odysseus during his tumultuous journey home following the Trojan War.
Holland said he signed on to the film without knowing much about it. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know what it’s about,” Holland recently said on The Dish podcast. “I’m super excited, but it’s been pretty quiet about the project. I met with (Nolan) and it was awesome. He kind of loosely pitched what it is, and I’m sure when he’s ready he’ll announce what it’s about”
The Marvel star told Good Morning America back in October that he would accept an offer to star in a Nolan movie “sight unseen.”
“When the opportunity came in, it was the phone call of a lifetime,” Holland said during an appearance on the morning program. “It was reminiscent of getting the call about Spider-Man 10 years ago.”
Holland’s co-star Hathaway recently told Women’s Wear Daily that hearing from Nolan for a third time “makes me feel like I’m doing something right.”
“It fills me with so much joy,” Hathaway said. “I love Chris and Emma Nolan so much, and to be invited into their world [is] one of the best places you can find yourself. Getting to be invited twice really felt like something, three felt like it would’ve been greedy, so I never let myself hope that that would happen, and that it has makes me emotional, to be perfectly honest.”
The Odyssey has been adapted for the big screen before, serving as an inspiration for the Coen brothers’ 2000 comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the recently released Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche drama The Return.
Prior to this week’s announcement, as casting fell into place over the last few months, rumours swirled around the plot for Nolan’s next film.
In October, Gizmodo published a report saying it had received a tip “from a reliable source that Nolan’s film is a vampire movie set in the 1920s.”
Another synopsis, revealed by Production Weekly and shared on X by Christopher Nolan Art & Updates, suggested the filmmaker was going to go in a completely new direction with his next movie said to be inspired by the 1983 action flick Blue Thunder and centre on “a pair of aerial helicopter cops, with an older mentor and younger lead.”
That outline was expanded upon in a viral Reddit post shared by someone who said the film would be “in the vein of Blue Thunder” because “Nolan is a fan of the movie & it was his starting point when putting the project together.”
“My sister’s father-in-law works at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn & there has been excitement recently among the personnel in the NYPD Aviation Unit that Christopher Nolan & key people from his production team will be arriving in November to spend roughly a month with the unit ahead of production of his next movie with Matt Damon joining early next year,” the Reddit post read. “The word is that the movie will be a New York-based futuristic action movie about a Helicopter pilot Cop who heads up the Aviation Unit in the US & the creation of a super-advanced yet dangerous Helicopter itself being pursued by terrorists.”
Instead of receiving screenplays, the post went on to add that key personnel were given high-quality versions of Blue Thunder, which starred the late Roy Scheider and was directed by John Badham, “as well as various items of written work related to that movie.”
There was also speculation that Nolan might be named as the director for the next James Bond film, with rumours circulating last fall that he was in talks to helm the “two or three” films in the franchise with the action set in the 1950s.
Nolan added his own fuel to that chatter when he was plugging Oppenheimer in July 2023.
“The influence of those movies in my filmography is embarrassingly apparent,” Nolan told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And so there’s no attempt to shy away from that. I love the films. You know, it would be an amazing privilege to do one.”
But Nolan confirmed he was not pursuing a Bond project as his next film last fall when he told the Associated Press: “No, sadly no — no truth to those rumours.”