Nolan chose "The Odyssey" after "Oppenheimer" as it had "never been done in modern cinema"

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Good luck trying to predict what Christopher Nolan will do next.

In the past, the director has dovetailed from Batman into the world-warping Inception and moved from the more grounded war drama Dunkirk into the mind-bending Tenet.

This time, Nolan is worlds away from Oppenheimer, the near-billion dollar biopic that charted the trials, tribulations, and immense guilt of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he led the charge to build the atomic bomb.

The Odyssey , while touching on the recurring Nolan theme of returning home, is a sword-and-sandals epic in every sense of the word, from the towering Trojan Horse to intimate family drama that wraps around Homer's epic poem.

So, why take a risk and shift into unfamiliar territory? As Nolan explains to GamesRadar+, the success of Oppenheimer provided the platform to take a risk and give the audience something that felt truly special.

"Oppenheimer was a much bigger success than any of us had anticipated," Nolan says. "It was a really thrilling thing, but it also buys you the opportunity to do something – to get a film made that you might otherwise not be able to get made."

On the potential of The Odyssey, which follows Odysseus' decades-long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, Nolan outlines, "What you're looking for is to bring something new to show something to the audience that maybe they haven't had the chance to experience before. The Odyssey, ironically for a 3000-year-old foundational text, is a story really at the bottom of so many other stories that have followed it since. It underpins so much of movies, but it has never been done in modern cinema."

Nolan continues, "So, for me it was kind of a thrilling opportunity, a sort of a gap in the culture that you get to be able to fill. I really wanted to take that chance and do this on a big scale that hadn't been done before."

The Odyssey opens in cinemas on July 17.

For more, check out more of 2026's big movie release dates and our beginner's guide to The Odyssey . Then relive some of Nolan's classics with our ranking of the best Christopher Nolan movies .