Christopher Nolan Says The Odyssey Will Be Shorter than Oppenheimer — Entertainment News
Entertainment news arrived with a runtime comparison: Christopher Nolan said The Odyssey will be shorter than Oppenheimer, which ran 180 minutes. The new film is still being sold as an epic, and Nolan says he has treated it like one.
“It’s an epic film, as the subject matter demands,” Nolan said, adding: “But it is shorter.” That puts a specific ceiling on expectations for a Homer adaptation that has already been framed as a large-scale production rather than a compact prestige drama.
Nolan and Matt Damon
Nolan has already spent 91 days shooting the film and said he captured over two million feet of film. Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, the king making a decade-long journey home to wife Penelope after the Trojan War.
He also said much of the production was filmed at sea, with the cast playing the crew of Odysseus’ ship out on “the real waves, in the real places.” That choice signals a production built around scale and physical conditions, not studio convenience.
July 17 in Imax
The Odyssey is set to film July 17 in Imax, which makes the runtime remark more than a passing quote. Nolan is not trimming the project down into a conventional release; he is keeping it within the boundaries of an event movie while staying under Oppenheimer’s 180-minute mark.
“There’s a massive amount of pressure. Anyone taking on The Odyssey is taking on the hopes and dreams of people for epic movies everywhere and that comes with a huge responsibility,” he said. “What I learned from [making The Dark Knight trilogy] is that what people want from a movie about a beloved story, a beloved set of characters, is they want a strong and sincere interpretation.”
Epic scale, shorter runtime
“They want to know that a filmmaker has gone to the mat for it,” Nolan said. “I really tried to make the best film possible.” For readers tracking the film like an industry bet, the useful takeaway is simple: Nolan is promising scale, not bloat, and he is signaling that a shorter runtime will not mean a smaller production.
The cast around Damon includes Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Will Yun Lee, Rafi Gavron, Shiloh Fernandez, and Mia Goth. The next real marker is whether the Imax run translates that scale into a commercial rollout that can justify the film’s epic framing without leaning on a three-hour runtime.
