Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey will run under three hours, the director confirmed Wednesday — a notable restraint for a filmmaker whose last feature clocked in at exactly 180 minutes and still pulled nearly a billion dollars at the global box office.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Nolan said the film is “shorter” than Oppenheimer, his 2023 best picture winner, while acknowledging the scale of what he has taken on. “It’s an epic film, as the subject matter demands,” Nolan told the outlet. “But it is shorter.” The exact runtime has yet to be officially confirmed.
The practical reality of large-format projection likely shaped that decision as much as any artistic one. IMAX 70mm film projectors are generally limited to a three-hour maximum, and The Odyssey is the first Hollywood feature ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras. A newly engineered casing called a “blimp” was developed specifically for the production to quiet the famously loud IMAX rigs, allowing Nolan to capture dialogue-heavy scenes on large-format film for the first time.
Principal photography spanned 91 days between February and August 2025, wrapping nine days ahead of schedule, with location shooting across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland. Over two million feet of IMAX 70mm film was used during production.
The film carries a reported budget of $250 million — the largest of Nolan’s career — and an ensemble cast to match. Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, with Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, and Charlize Theron as Circe.
The pressure surrounding the project is something Nolan has addressed head-on. “Anyone taking on ‘The Odyssey’ is taking on the hopes and dreams of people for epic movies everywhere and that comes with a huge responsibility,” he told the AP, adding that making The Dark Knight trilogy taught him audiences want “a strong and sincere interpretation” of beloved stories.
The Odyssey was ranked as the most anticipated film of 2026 by IMDb, and advance IMAX ticket sales set precedents of their own. Tickets for select opening-weekend IMAX screenings went on sale a full year before release and sold out within 12 hours, generating approximately $1.5 million. Universal Pictures has set a July 17 theatrical release date, consistent with Nolan’s habit of releasing his biggest films in the summer.
Nolan told Empire magazine that the source material presented an opportunity he saw as genuinely unexplored territory. “What I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with — Ray Harryhausen movies and other things — I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”
Universal’s distribution chief Jim Orr, previewing the film at CinemaCon, called it “a visionary, once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would quite likely be proud of.”
