The Odyssey (2026): Cast, Plot, Reviews & Ending Explained

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — his first film since the seven-Oscar sweep of Oppenheimer — is in cinemas now, having opened on Friday 17 July 2026 with previews from 16 July. Matt Damon stars as Odysseus in an R-rated, 2-hour-52-minute epic shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, a first for any feature. The reviews have landed, and they’re emphatic: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and 89 on Metacritic, with a narrow but real seam of dissent. Here’s the full cast, what the story covers, what critics actually say — and the ending explained, behind a spoiler wall.

When does The Odyssey come out, and how can I watch it?

The Odyssey opened in cinemas on 17 July 2026 in the US and UK, with preview showings from the afternoon of 16 July, and rolls out internationally across its first five days (one widely-repeated figure puts that at 73 markets, though we can only trace it to aggregator coverage). This one is built for the biggest screen you can find: Nolan shot the entire film with new IMAX 70mm film cameras — the first feature ever made that way, burning through more than two million feet of IMAX film — and it’s playing 41 IMAX 70mm film locations worldwide, exactly 25 of which are in the US. (We list all 25 — and explain how to avoid booking a digital screen by mistake — in where to watch The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm .) It went out on a reported $250 million budget.

On the money: industry tracking pointed to a $85–105 million North American opening and roughly $190–215 million worldwide. Treat those as projections, not results — as of publication no actual grosses have been reported, not even a Thursday-preview figure.

The Odyssey cast: who plays whom?

The ensemble is enormous even by Nolan standards, mixing longtime collaborators with first-timers. One point worth clearing up, because listings have differed: footage Universal showed at CinemaCon this spring settled it — Charlize Theron plays the nymph Calypso and Samantha Morton plays the enchantress Circe, not the other way around, as early reports and some databases have had it. Lupita Nyong’o, meanwhile, takes on a dual role.

A note on the ones you may have seen elsewhere: a few widely-repeated castings — Mia Goth as Melantho, Corey Hawkins as Polybus and Travis Scott as the bard Demodocus — we could only trace back to aggregator sites, not to Universal or the trades, so we’ve left them out of the table rather than present them as confirmed. And for anyone keeping score, Holland, Zendaya and Bernthal reunite just two weeks later in a certain web-slinger’s next outing.

What is The Odyssey about?

The film adapts Homer’s roughly 2,700-year-old epic: after ten years of the Trojan War, Odysseus sets out for home — and the journey takes another ten. Blown across the sea and toyed with by gods, he and his crew face the Cyclops Polyphemus, the enchantress Circe (who turns his men to swine), the song of the Sirens, and the nymph Calypso, who holds him on her island for years. Back on Ithaca, his wife Penelope fends off a houseful of suitors led by the preening Antinous, while his son Telemachus sets out to learn whether his father is even alive.

The trailers made clear Nolan isn’t skipping the greatest hits — the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops and the sirens all feature — and true to form he shot as much as possible for real, across Greece, Sicily, Morocco, Scotland and Iceland. On structure: Homer tells the story out of order, beginning in the middle with flashbacks, and Nolan — cinema’s great non-linear storyteller — confirmed his film follows suit, opening in Ithaca and unfolding non-linearly.

What the scores actually say

The embargo lifted on 15 July, and the verdict is emphatic. The Odyssey holds 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 276 critics, with the audience Popcornmeter matching at 96%, and 89/100 on Metacritic from 58 critics — 54 positive, 4 mixed and not a single negative review. For context, that places it just below Oppenheimer (90) on Metacritic, with Dunkirk (94) still Nolan’s high-water mark.

The rarest number there is not the 96%. It is the zero. Fifty-eight Metacritic reviews without a single negative is a far harder thing to achieve than a high percentage — at that sample size, most acclaimed films have picked up at least one dissenter. This is a distribution with almost no tail.

But 89 is not Nolan’s ceiling, and that matters. It sits below Oppenheimer at 90 and well below Dunkirk at 94, which remains his Metacritic high. So the shape here is near-universal approval rather than peak enthusiasm — almost everyone passes it, fewer are overwhelmed. Those are different achievements and the aggregate blurs them.

The dissent tells you more than the praise does. It concentrates on one thing: emotional distance — impressive rather than affecting. That is a revealing place for criticism to land. When the people who like a film least can only fault its temperature, the execution is not in question; the argument is about whether a story built on longing for home should feel this composed.

The casting objections cluster in one place too, and it is not the lead. They gather around Telemachus, around Athena being underused, around the younger and mortal roles rather than around Damon’s Odysseus. The Athena complaint is worth pausing on, because this film reveals her not to be the goddess at all but a projection of a woman killed in front of Odysseus at Troy. A presence that feels underused may be the design rather than a waste of the actor — which is the kind of thing a first-viewing review is structurally badly placed to judge.

One practical caveat the scores cannot carry. A 2h52m film shot entirely in a format only a minority of screens can project creates a two-tier audience: the single most-praised quality is the one most viewers will not actually get. If the IMAX photography is the reason to see it, the screen you book matters more than the score does.

How Homer’s poem ends

Before the film’s ending, the baseline every adaptation has to reckon with. Consider this a 2,700-year-old spoiler warning.

(Nolan’s departures from Homer go well beyond the ending — the cut “Nobody” trick, the gods rendered as weather, the Phaeacians deleted. We compare the two in full in The Odyssey (2026) vs Homer’s epic .)

In the poem, Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca and — disguised by Athena as a beggar — enters his own palace, sizing up the suitors who have spent years devouring his household and pressuring Penelope to remarry. Penelope — who has stalled them with tricks of her own, famously unweaving a burial shroud each night — announces a contest: she will marry whichever man can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads. Only the disguised beggar can. His first arrow after that goes through the throat of Antinous, the suitors’ ringleader, and with Telemachus and a few loyal servants he kills every last suitor in the hall. Penelope, wary after twenty years, tests him one final time by ordering their marriage bed moved — a bed Odysseus built around a living olive tree, immovable, a secret only her true husband would know. His outrage at the impossible order proves who he is, and they are reunited. The received text then closes with Odysseus reuniting with his aged father Laertes and Athena stepping in to halt a blood feud with the suitors’ families, imposing peace on Ithaca — a triumphant, restorative homecoming in which he stays king. (Worth a scholar’s asterisk, carefully put: the ancient scholia report that Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus made line 23.296 — right after the reunion — the peras/telos of the poem. Whether they meant “the genuine text ends here” or “this is its culmination” is still argued, and both kept the following lines in their texts; Aristarchus alone is separately said to have athetised what follows, which is the tail of Book 23 as well as Book 24. So “Homer’s ending” carries a contested tail — but calling Book 24 a forgery overstates it.)

The Odyssey ending explained (full spoilers)

Spoiler wall — everything below reveals how Nolan’s film ends. Turn back now if you haven’t seen it.

The homecoming plays out roughly as Homer set it up — until it doesn’t. Odysseus reaches Ithaca and, on the advice of Agamemnon’s shade, enters his own hall disguised as a beggar, where Antinous and the suitors have overrun the court and plotted to kill Telemachus. Penelope sets the contest of the bow; Odysseus strings it himself and fires an arrow through a line of axes, and that feat, rather than Homer’s secret marriage-bed test, is what proves who he is. He and Telemachus then turn on the suitors, and Odysseus is badly wounded in the fight. (What exactly becomes of the rest of them is genuinely disputed: some accounts describe Odysseus killing them, others have the survivors surrendering once Antinous falls. We’re not going to pick a side the sources don’t agree on.)

Then Nolan breaks from the poem entirely. Rather than reclaim his throne, Odysseus abdicates to Telemachus, who stays behind as King of Ithaca. Odysseus takes a self-imposed exile and sails west into the unknown with Penelope — an act that answers both a charge laid on him by his dead crew in the Underworld (to honour the men he could not bury) and a suggestion Penelope herself made before he ever left for Troy: that they simply sail away together.

Why he leaves is the film’s whole thesis. This is an Odysseus tormented not by the sea but by the Trojan Horse — a stratagem that violated “Zeus’ Law,” the sacred code of host and guest. He confesses to Penelope and Telemachus that the fall of Troy was the fall of civilisation itself, and his abdication and exile are penance for having broken the civilised world. It reframes the whole journey: he struggled to get home because he did not believe he deserved to — which makes the film a companion piece to Oppenheimer, another study of a man who cannot live with what his own cleverness unleashed.

The Athena reveal. Zendaya’s Athena, present throughout, is revealed during the late depiction of Troy’s fall not to be the goddess at all. She’s a projection — the manifestation of an innocent young woman slaughtered in front of Odysseus at Troy, his guilt given divine form. It’s the change that most sharply strips the poem of its literal gods.

Does Odysseus survive? The accounts genuinely disagree. One reading has him simply living, sailing west to see out his days with no ambiguity. Another has him surviving seemingly fatal injuries. A third notes that the film deliberately blurs its chronology, which leaves open that the westward voyage is a dying vision while Penelope cradles him in the throne room. The abdication and the sailing-west imagery aren’t in dispute; whether he’s alive for them is, and we’re not going to pretend the sources agree when they don’t.

How it differs from Homer, in one line: the poem ends with Odysseus killing the suitors and remaining king, with Athena imposing peace — a restoration. Nolan ends with him giving the throne away and leaving, a homecoming of guilt rather than triumph.

The bottom line

Shot entirely for IMAX and reviewed as one of the best-received films of Nolan’s career — 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 89 on Metacritic, and no negative reviews on record — The Odyssey is very much one to see on the biggest screen you can find, with the caveat that a real seam of critics find it more monumental than moving. For more of our film coverage and ending explainers — including this year’s other big-screen adaptation, Project Hail Mary — browse our Movies section .