Christopher Nolan’s Epic Did the One Thing That Nearly Ended Steven Spielberg’s Career

Empire magazine just dropped the first-look photos from Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and yeah, the scale matches the mythology. Nolan also told the outlet this shoot nearly broke the bar for what he considers difficult, which is saying something for a guy who strapped an IMAX camera to a Spitfire.

Nolan, a boat, and a whole lot of real ocean

Nolan says the team chewed through more than two million feet of film during a 91-day shoot, much of it actually at sea. Not a tank. Not a studio backlot. Open water. The cast playing Odysseus' crew spent months battling real waves, real wind, and the kind of weather that laughs at production schedules. Nolan wanted the movie to feel like an authentic voyage, not a recreation, so they went to real locations and let the elements dictate the mood.

He even spent roughly four months out there himself. The idea was to capture how brutal those journeys would have been in an unmapped, uncharted world, and to let the physical grind shape the storytelling. You can feel the intent: embrace reality so the movie has no choice but to feel lived-in.

This approach has a history... and scars

If this is giving you flashbacks to Jaws, you are not alone. At the Academy Museum in Los Angeles during the film's 50th anniversary, Steven Spielberg talked about his own ocean gamble (as reported by The Guardian). He took a full Hollywood crew 12 miles out into the Atlantic to shoot a movie with a mechanical shark. The ocean, famously, did not cooperate. The weather kept turning, the shark kept breaking, the crew kept getting seasick, and the budget went sideways. Spielberg genuinely thought he'd torpedoed his career mid-shoot.

"My hubris was that we could take a Hollywood crew, go out 12 miles into the Atlantic Ocean, and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark... I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws, because everybody was saying to me, 'You are never going to get hired again.'

Ive never seen so much vomit in my life."

Nolan is now running a similarly risky play: months on the water, a large cast and crew, and a commitment to practical reality over controllable comfort. It's thrilling moviemaking. It's also the type of decision that can turn a schedule into a storm chart.

Will The Odyssey be another Jaws?

Short answer: no, and it doesn't need to be. Jaws in 1975 was a cultural shockwave. It basically minted the idea of the summer blockbuster and reprogrammed studio thinking. The Odyssey is a different beast: an epic drawn from ancient Greek myth, not a contemporary thriller about a shark sneaking up on beach towns.

Could Nolan's take win awards and make a pile of money? Absolutely. Could it be one of his most beloved films? Would not be shocking. But matching Jaws' once-in-a-generation pop-culture footprint is a near-impossible target. Spielberg made a classic that still echoes through the industry; that kind of long-tail legacy is rare by definition.

• Title: The Odyssey
• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Benny Safdie
• Shoot stats: Over two million feet of film across a 91-day schedule, largely on the open ocean
• Release date: July 17, 2026

Bottom line: Nolan is swinging big and doing it the hard way. Even if this doesn't rewrite movie history the way Jaws did, it sure sounds like an adventure you'll want to see on the biggest screen you can find on July 17, 2026.