Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Prologue Leaves Early Viewers Awestruck — Is This the Biggest Movie Ever Made?
Early reactions to the prologue for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey rave about a breathtaking, jaw-dropping spectacle that teases his biggest big-screen epic yet.
Christopher Nolan dropped an early tease for The Odyssey, and it is not subtle. The movie itself doesn’t land until July 17, 2026, but a nearly six-minute prologue is already playing in front of IMAX 70mm screenings of Sinners and One Battle After Another. The short version: people walked out buzzing, and some of the reactions read like they just saw a miracle projected on film.
Where to see it, and what’s next
If you want the extended look, you’ll need an IMAX 70mm ticket to Sinners or One Battle After Another. A standard trailer (shorter than the prologue, but a proper full trailer) is set to run ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash next weekend. So yes, there’s something for the IMAX purists now and something for the multiplex crowd in a few days.
So what is Nolan’s The Odyssey?
It’s Nolan’s spin on Homer’s epic about Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, trying to fight his way home after a decade-long Trojan War. On the way, he crosses paths with the Cyclops Polyphemus, nearly gets undone by the Sirens, and tangles with the witch-goddess Circe. Back in Ithaca, everyone assumes he’s dead, which puts his wife Penelope and their son Telemachus in the crosshairs of aggressive suitors who are more interested in grabbing control of the kingdom than in romance.
The cast is stacked: Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Mia Goth, Zendaya, Elliot Page, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Ryan Hurst, Logan Marshall-Green, Lupita Nyong'o, Josh Stewart, Benny Safdie, Corey Hawkins, and Elyes Gabel.
Shot like a moon landing
The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX film cameras. Not “a lot of IMAX,” not “select sequences,” but 100 percent. To meet that ambition, IMAX and Cinemark cut a deal to install new gear and beef up projection in 17 locations across the U.S. and South America. Studios don’t usually trigger hardware upgrades across continents for a single release, so that tells you how serious they are about how this looks and sounds.
Where they filmed
Nolan’s team went wide. Morocco stood in for Troy, specifically Ait Benhaddou. Greece got a workout too: the Peloponnese, Pylos, Methoni Castle, and Nestor's Cave. They also shot in Italy, including Favignana and the Aeolian Islands in Sicily; in Scotland along the Moray Firth coast and at Findlater Castle; and in Iceland. Favignana, nicknamed Goat Island and part of the Egadi archipelago off Sicily’s northwest coast, has long been rumored as the kind of place Homer might have imagined Odysseus and his crew stopping to roast goats and restock. Nolan clearly did his homework on the geography of the myth.
What the prologue shows (and why people are losing it)
Early viewers say the prologue is a thunderclap. The presentation on IMAX 70mm is reportedly monstrous in the best way: image clarity that slaps, sound design that ratchets your nerves, and a Ludwig Goransson score that builds like a pressure wave. Several reactions singled out the scale of the Siege of Troy material Nolan staged, praising how clearly he lays out the chaos without losing you in it. Matt Damon apparently grabs the screen from his first moment, and yes, there’s a quick peek at the Cyclops that people called flat-out scary.
Comparisons were flying fast: some called it Nolan’s biggest swing yet, others stacked the vibe next to old-school epics like The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia, and Ben-Hur, with a dose of the relentless, haunted spectacle you’d recognize from Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises. One reaction even argued it looks bigger than Dune in scope. Hyperbole? Maybe. But it’s consistent hyperbole.
'This may possibly be the biggest movie ever made.'
Other pull quotes from the crowd: a few said the five minutes felt like the most intense stretch of Nolan’s career; more than one person described the music physically hitting them in the chest; another said they’d never seen Nolan stage scale like this before. One viewer went full caps lock and declared it the film of the century. Subtlety is not the prevailing mood.
The bottom line
If Nolan’s going to adapt Homer, he’s clearly doing it with maximum horsepower: all-IMAX photography, globe-spanning locations, and a prologue engineered to make your pulse spike. The movie’s a ways off, but the rollout is already aggressive and kind of irresistible. If you catch the prologue, let me know if you walked out a believer or just mildly deaf from the drums.