Christopher Nolan always makes supersized blockbusters, but his upcoming “The Odyssey” will be his most supersized effort yet. The Odyssey” will be the first movie shot entirely with Imax cameras. Nolan is currently in production on the epic, which stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway and more.
Nolan has been building toward making a movie entirely with Imax cameras since 2008, when “The Dark Knight” became the first Hollywood movie to utilize Imax cameras to shoot select action scenes. Since then, Nolan has used Imax cameras for increasingly more scenes with every new release. His 2023 Oscar winner “Oppenheimer” was the first movie to use Imax black-and-white 65mm film.
“The Odyssey” is being shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who has collaborated with Nolan on “Interstellar,” “Dunkirk,” “Tenet” and “Oppenheimer.” He won the best cinematography Oscar for the latter film and spoke to Variety at the time about working with Nolan and Kodak to create the first stock of Imax 65mm black-and-white film.
“Black and white film doesn’t exist for 65 millimeters, so our first challenge was starting to talk to Kodak about if they could provide us with the necessary film stock that we needed for this film,” Hoytema said. “We needed to re-engineer the cameras as well because those cameras have these pressure plates behind the film gates that are made out of metal and the backing is much thinner than color stock. The light would bleed back into the films creating all these artifacts.”
Nolan adapted Homer for “The Odyssey” and is re-teaming with “Oppenheimer” studio Universal Pictures for the movie’s release. At Cinema Con earlier this year, Jim Orr, the studio’s distribution chief, predicted that “The Odyssey” will be “a visionary, once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would quite likely be proud of.”
“The Odyssey” is set for release in theaters on July 27, 2026.
