Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey trailer is out now

Universal has officially dropped the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and it’s now available for everyone to watch. The two-minute clip gives us our first proper look at Matt Damon as the Greek hero Odysseus, complete with a rugged beard and a gravelly voiceover.

“After years of war,” he intones, “no one could stand between my men and home. Not even me.” It’s exactly the kind of line you’d expect from a Nolan epic.

The first film ever shot entirely on IMAX

We also get brief glimpses of Tom Holland as Telemachus, the son determined to find his father, and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Odysseus’s concerned wife back in Ithaca. The trailer focuses heavily on the voyage itself, with shots of storms at sea and what appears to be some properly mythic imagery.

There’s a giant humanoid figure entering a cave full of soldiers – almost certainly the Cyclops – and the undead seemingly rising from the ground. Oh, and the Trojan Horse makes an appearance, complete with a tense moment where a soldier inside gets cut by a sword piercing the wood and has to stay silent.

That said, the trailer keeps most of the sprawling cast under wraps. Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Mia Goth, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, and Elliot Page are all in this thing, but you won’t spot them here. Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon is apparently behind a menacing helmet in one shot, but that’s about it.

This is Nolan’s thirteenth feature film, and the first ever to be shot entirely in IMAX’s largest film format. Universal actually put a six-minute prologue in theatres earlier this month, and before that, a cinema trailer debuted back in July. That one got leaked online pretty quickly, which probably explains why this new trailer feels deliberately different in scope.

ALSO READ: 12 best anime shows of all time

The Odyssey opens on 17 July 2026 in the UK and US. Given that Nolan’s last film, Oppenheimer, made nearly a billion dollars worldwide and swept the Oscars with wins for Best Picture and Best Director, expectations are understandably through the roof. Some tickets actually went on sale during the summer – a full year before release.