Christopher Nolan showed new footage from The Odyssey at CinemaCon on Wednesday, and the clip put Charlize Theron at the center of one of the oldest stories in Western literature. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is seen speaking with Calypso, played by Theron, as he asks how long he has been there and whether he once had a wife, children or a son.
The footage then cuts to flashes of a younger Odysseus with his son, played by Tom Holland, and his wife, played by Anne Hathaway. Nolan also showed one of the epic’s best-known passages: the Greeks hiding inside a wooden horse during the Trojan War, the horse drifting in the sea with men inside fighting not to drown before being pulled into Troy and waiting until night to attack. That assault is led by Damon and Jon Bernthal.
The display mattered because it gave theater owners and studio executives a first real look at a film that is already drawing outsized interest. Tickets to see it in Imax 70mm on opening day sold out a year in advance, a sign of how much anticipation Nolan’s next project has generated after Oppenheimer. He called The Odyssey a story that has fascinated generations for 3,000 years and said he wanted to bring it to a modern cinema audience.
Nolan’s comments framed the adaptation as both ancient and newly engineered. He said it would be quicker to list who is not in the film than who is, a nod to a cast that includes Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth, Elliot Page, Samantha Morton, Ryan Hurst and Travis Scott. Holland, for his part, described it as “an absolute masterpiece” and said the experience left him asking, “How did you do that?”
The friction in the rollout is that the story being sold is not small enough to be contained by a preview. It is Homer’s epic about the Greek king of Ithaca on a 10-year journey home after the Trojan War, and Nolan said the production itself has been punishing, calling the film “an absolute nightmare to film.” The scope is part of the pitch, but it is also the burden: the movie has to make something so familiar feel newly difficult, and the footage shown on Wednesday suggests Nolan is aiming for exactly that.
The Odyssey is set for a July 17 theatrical release, and the question now is not whether the movie has attention. It does. The question is whether Nolan’s version can turn a story that has lasted 3,000 years into an event that still feels immediate when audiences finally see it on screen.