The new trailer for ‘The Odyssey’ confirms it: Nolan is going for the Oscar

Excitement has been building for months, and for good reason. ‘The Odyssey’ is one of the most anticipated films of 2026; it opens on July 17 in theaters worldwide, and just a few minutes ago, its spectacular new trailer was released. With a star-studded cast featuring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, and Matt Damon, among others, all signs point to Christopher Nolan’s film being in the running for a few Oscars. The plot of ‘The Odyssey’ adapts the mythological epic about the return home of Odysseus (or Ulysses), played by Matt Damon, following the Trojan War. His journey is no walk in the park, as according to the original story, it took the hero ten long years to return home. For that very reason, there’s a lot of curiosity about the film’s runtime, since condensing a story like that into two or three hours at most doesn’t seem easy at all. Surprisingly, Nolan himself recently stated that it won’t be as long as ‘Oppenheimer’. A few months ago, Nolan spoke about the challenge of incorporating fantastical elements into a film like this. In the era in which the film is set (the 8th century B.C.), natural phenomena such as a volcanic eruption, a storm, or an earthquake were perceived as supernatural. As he explained, the filmmaker always kept something very important in mind to preserve the film’s atmosphere: recreating the feeling people had back then—that all those natural phenomena had a divine origin.