Christopher Nolan has never shied away from pushing the limits of cinema, and with his upcoming epic The Odyssey, he’s about to make history — again. At an event today at the Cannes Film Festival, Collider’s Steve Weintraub was in attendance as IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond revealed a huge and groundbreaking behind-the-scenes milestone: The Odyssey will be the first film ever shot entirely using IMAX cameras.
“Chris is going to kill me for saying this, which makes him happy,” Gelfond said, laughing. “Which is, about a year before Chris started filming Odyssey, he called me in and said, ‘Rich, I want to make a whole film filmed with IMAX cameras.’”
That’s no small ask. As Gelfond explained, there were a host of technical barriers that previously made it impossible to film an entire feature exclusively with IMAX cameras. “As many of you know, you couldn’t do that for a lot of reasons, and he can tell you all of them,” Gelfond said. “But they had to do with time to reload, how you could see dailies, sound. There are lots of issues.”
Undeterred, Nolan issued Gelfond and the IMAX team a cinematic challenge worthy of Odysseus himself, the solution for which marks a turning point not just for Nolan, but for the industry at large.
“He said, ‘I’m going to give you a challenge. If you can figure out how to solve these problems, I’m going to make Odyssey 100% filmed with IMAX cameras.’ And we’ve solved his problems. So, this will be the first film ever released filmed 100% with IMAX cameras.”
Nolan has long been a champion of the IMAX format, having used it in large-scale sequences in The Dark Knight, Dunkirk, Tenet, and most recently, Oppenheimer. But with The Odyssey, he’ll expand that visual grandeur to every frame of the film — bringing Homer’s epic tale to life in its most immersive form yet.
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The film, which is set for release on July 17, 2026, stars Matt Damon as Odysseus alongside a massive ensemble that includes Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal, Mia Goth and many more. Meanwhile, the film will look incredible. Why? Hoyte van Hoytema is handling cinematography, and filming is already underway in breathtaking locations like Greece, Morocco, and Sicily, so the film is going to look absolutely stunning. And on IMAX? We’re already seated.
via Collider