He’s taken on comic books, black holes, and the making of the atom bomb. Now director Christopher Nolan has turned his sights to one of the oldest works of literature in the Western canon. How does the man who brought us The Dark Knight imagine Homer’s The Odyssey? The movie’s first trailer is finally here to give us some initial clues.
Sitting at just under two minutes and encompassing plenty of brooding fadeouts set to ominous drums and flutes, the first trailer for The Odyssey briefly shows us Odysseus (Matt Damon) and King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) after the battle of Troy has finished, and sets the stage for the former’s long and perilous journey home now that the war has ended. From there we get glimpses of the Trojan Horse, the cyclops, the underworld, and other notable elements of the ancient Greek poem.
Matt Damon as Odysseus speaks about the determination of his men, after years of war, to make it back home. We also catch glimpses of Tom Holland as Telemachus (his son) and Anne Hathaway as Penelope (his wife). Damon speaks with a weary exhaustion that would be captured perfectly by the character-aging-in-real-time meme from the end of Saving Private Ryan.
And this version of The Odyssey very much feels like it could be Nolan’s version of that WWII epic, but with a twist. While most great war films focus on the destruction, tragedy, and bravery in the midst of battle, The Odyssey is about what happens when the bloodshed is over, the cost of victory, the price of legacy, and whether those who left can ever truly come home. Nolan’s take on one of literature’s quintessential quest narratives releases July 17, 2026, and it’s probably going to be one worth seeing in IMAX.
