Sightlines · reception
How The Odyssey was received
2026 · Christopher Nolan · The Odyssey on Sightlines
The arc
Reviews debuted at a 98% Tomatometer before settling at 94% across 515 reviews, with Metacritic at 88 and audiences grading it an A on CinemaScore, and a $264.1 million worldwide opening, Nolan's biggest, snowballed into $1.789 billion by mid-October, the second-biggest film of 2026.
What’s debated
Critics split between the rapturous camp, TheWrap calling it Nolan's finest achievement and the Telegraph the year's best so far, and dissenters like Time, The New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, who found it lifeless, prosaic, and sunk by its own bleakness.
Its footprint
The numbers became the story: IMAX 70mm runs were extended a month on demand and it passed Avatar as the format's highest grosser, even as classicists Mary Beard and Emily Wilson publicly panned its dialogue and handling of the poem, the American accents sparked a pre-release fight Nolan dismissed as irrelevant until people saw the film, and racist attacks on Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen drew their own backlash.
Where it stands
Too early for prizes, but it is already Nolan's highest-grossing film, overtaking The Dark Knight Rises, and sits as 2026's second-biggest earner with a critics consensus crediting it for giving myth primal human feeling.
Did you know? It is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras, burning through over 2 million feet of stock across 91 days in Morocco, Western Sahara, Greece, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland, on a $250 million budget.
Named by the director
- Andrei Rublev (1966) — Nolan cited Tarkovsky's film for its visual style and atmospheric tone
- Ran (1985) — Kurosawa's epic, likewise named for visual style and atmosphere
- Ray Harryhausen — Nolan pointed to Harryhausen and the Greek-mythology films he watched in his youth; on creatures he said "a monster is not a monster", you approach them like any other character