Photo Credit: Universal Pictures
The Odyssey could wind up being Christopher Nolan’s best movie yet.

Nolan’s The Odyssey will be released in United States theaters on July 17, 2026, from Universal Pictures. An adaptation of the ancient Greek epic by Homer, its stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and Anne Hathaway as Penelope.

Why could The Odyssey be Christopher Nolan’s best movie?

With a new trailer for The Odyssey having recently been released, this movie has the best to be in Nolan’s filmography yet, as it looks completely different than anything he’s done before. 

Nolan is great at experimenting with different genres. He goes back to the sci-fi well relatively often — 2010’s Inception, 2014’s Interstellar, and 2020’s Tenet — but he’s also willing to try something new. He’ll make a Batman movie, then he’ll make something about dueling magicians. A war movie and a biopic. We’ve yet to see something like a romantic comedy from him, but maybe someday we could.

Whenever Nolan takes on a new genre, the results are typically fantastic. The common consensus might be that The Dark Knight is the best of his Batman movies, but Batman Begins is still highly regarded among the superhero film community. When he took on the war movie genre, we got Dunkirk, which was fantastic. And his biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer won all kinds of Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Taking on the fantasy genre is a big turn for Nolan — again, he’s never really done anything like this. It looks to be his biggest movie purely in terms of scope to date, and the trailer already proves that he knows exactly what he’s doing. And it doesn’t even show us all too much, as we’ve yet to glimpse the Cyclops or the Sirens.

We’ll have to wait until next summer to see how it all turns out, but The Odyssey should have all Christopher Nolan fans very, very excited.