The Odyssey (2026) Guide: Cast, Runtime and Where to Watch

A 2,800-year-old story, shot like nothing before it

The pitch is simple and the execution is not: Christopher Nolan adapted Homer’s Odyssey, and shot the whole thing on IMAX film cameras, a format no narrative feature had used start to finish before this one. Matt Damon plays Odysseus trying to get home from Troy across ten years of monsters, gods and bad decisions, while Anne Hathaway’s Penelope holds off suitors back in Ithaca and Tom Holland’s Telemachus grows up waiting for a father he barely remembers. It is Nolan’s longest film at 172 minutes, and the biggest swing of his career: a myth everyone half-knows, told with the technical ambition he usually spends on time travel and dream logic.

The cast is where the film hides its best jokes about itself. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the suitor trying to take Ithaca out from under Odysseus; Charlize Theron is Circe and Samantha Morton is a different sorceress, Calypso, so the film doesn’t collapse its two witch-women into one; and Zendaya’s Athena is the god actually steering the plot, the way she does in the poem. Jon Bernthal’s Agamemnon-adjacent Menelaus and John Leguizamo’s loyal swineherd Eumaeus fill out Ithaca’s half of the story. None of it requires having read the Odyssey in school. The film explains its own rules as it goes, the way Nolan’s films always do.

It has been in theaters and IMAX since July 17, 2026, and the film’s own site still only sells tickets — no rent, no buy, no subscription link anywhere on it. Trade coverage has a digital and 4K/Blu-ray date of November 17, 2026, four days after this guide was checked; a subscription date on Peacock, Universal’s own service, hasn’t been set. If you want another Nolan epic that earns its runtime while this one is still theater-only, our Dark Knight guide covers where to watch the one everyone already has an opinion on.