Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens wide in cinemas on Friday, 17 July 2026, following a scarcity-driven rollout built around IMAX 70mm exclusivity in the weeks before.
Nolan shot the entire 173-minute film on IMAX's 70mm cameras, the first commercial feature to do so, and built a three-week IMAX-exclusive booking window ahead of wider formats.
Matt Damon leads as Odysseus in an adaptation of Homer's epic that leans on "tactile realism," rendering the poem's gods and monsters through phenomena the ancient Greeks might plausibly have witnessed, with Tom Holland's Telemachus and Anne Hathaway's Penelope carrying the domestic half of the story Homer tells in parallel. The $250 million production is among Nolan's largest and most ambitious.
The reason to plan around this release is scale: advance IMAX 70mm shows were already selling out weeks before release, an unusually early sellout pattern that signals real demand for the specific format. Standard-format screenings remain the more realistic option for casual moviegoing plans once the exclusive window narrows.
Confirmed: the 17 July wide release, the IMAX 70mm format and exclusive early window, and the Damon-Holland-Hathaway cast. Unconfirmed this far out: full critical reception, and how audiences will respond to Nolan's grounded, near-mythological approach to material more commonly adapted as pure fantasy.
