The Odyssey is still in theaters, five weeks after opening on 17 July, and it now has a home date: it arrives for digital rental and purchase, and on 4K Blu-ray, on Tuesday 17 November, four months to the day after release. Until then the film stays where Nolan wants it, on the largest screens that will show it.
Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca trying to make it home ten years after the fall of Troy, while Anne Hathaway waits as his wife Penelope and Tom Holland plays their son Telemachus. The 88 on Metacritic puts it among the best-reviewed titles of Nolan's career.
What makes this Odyssey different is how it was actually made. Nolan asked IMAX to build a camera that could handle an entire feature, dialogue scenes included, without the format's usual grinding motor noise drowning out the actors. The result is a new 65mm camera developed with Kodak, Panavision and FotoKem, wrapped in a custom soundproof housing quiet enough for close-ups. The Odyssey is the first movie ever shot entirely on it.
That same instinct for doing things the hard way carried through to the monsters. Rather than building the Cyclops and the rest of Homer's creatures inside a computer, the production leaned on puppetry, prosthetics and old-school camera trickery, filling in digitally only where practical effects could not stretch any further.
It has paid off: The Odyssey is already Nolan's highest-grossing film. Homer's epic has been adapted before, but rarely with this much money, patience or stubbornness about how the image gets made, and that is the argument for seeing it on the biggest screen you can reach before November rather than waiting for it to come to you.
