Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' Is the Most Anticipated Movie of the Year — Here's Where Things Stand
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No reviews yet. Embargoes still in place. None of it has slowed the conversation down for a second. Everything worth knowing ahead of July 17 — and what the people betting on it are seeing.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey hasn't been reviewed by a single critic yet. The embargo is still in place, and Rotten Tomatoes shows zero scored entries. That has done absolutely nothing to slow the conversation around what might be the single most anticipated film of the year — if anything, the silence has only made it louder.
That's the strange thing about a Nolan release at this scale. Most movies fight to be noticed. This one has spent the better part of two years generating headlines, casting debates, leaked-trailer panics, and sold-out opening-weekend tickets without offering up so much as a runtime until recently. The information vacuum hasn't dampened the hype; it's become the engine of it. Every withheld detail gets filled in by speculation, and every piece of speculation becomes its own news cycle. By the time anyone is actually allowed to tell you whether the film is good, the audience will have spent eighteen months arguing about it sight unseen.
What follows is everything actually worth knowing ahead of the July 17 release — the cast, the unprecedented technical gamble, the early informal word trickling out of the first screenings, and the backlash that arrived, as it always does now, well before the work itself. And because the one question everyone actually wants answered — is it any good? — won't have a real answer until the embargo breaks, it's worth looking at the one place already trying to price that answer in real time: the prediction markets, where the uncertainty itself has become something people are willing to bet on.
They cast everyone
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Start with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, both Nolan veterans reuniting with him more than a decade after Interstellar. Tom Holland plays Telemachus, Odysseus's son, in his first Nolan collaboration. Robert Pattinson, a few years removed from Tenet, turns up as Antinous, the most dangerous of Penelope's suitors. From there it just keeps expanding: Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Lupita Nyong'o in a dual role as both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Jon Bernthal as the Spartan king Menelaus, Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, Samantha Morton as Circe, John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, plus Elliot Page, Mia Goth, and Himesh Patel rounding out the ensemble. Travis Scott even shows up as a bard — Nolan's nod to the Odyssey's origins as oral, sung poetry.
It's the kind of ensemble that draws the obvious Oppenheimer comparison, and that film famously took the SAG Award for Best Ensemble. There's a real-life wrinkle too: Holland and Zendaya, a couple off-screen, share scenes for the first time since 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The first movie ever shot entirely on IMAX
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This is the first Hollywood feature shot start to finish on IMAX cameras, a technical swing that forced Nolan's team to build custom rigs just so actors could hear each other during dialogue. Damon described the in-camera noise as "like a blender, like a Cuisinart in your face," and said the production rigged a system of mirrors purely to keep the actors' eyelines close to the lens. At a reported $250 million budget and a two-hour-fifty-two-minute runtime, it's Nolan's biggest swing yet — a film he's wanted to make for twenty years, ever since Homer's text first got under his skin.
What the early word actually is
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The first organized press screenings happened in New York only days ago. Reviews are still embargoed, but informal reactions from attendees not bound by it have circulated, and they've skewed positive — Damon's performance is the one being singled out, with Hathaway, Pattinson, and Holland also drawing praise. Jonathan Nolan, the director's brother and no slouch himself (Westworld, Fallout), called the film "spectacular" and "tremendous" after an early look, adding that "it's an incredible achievement."
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It's worth being precise about what that is and isn't: real, but informal, word-of-mouth from a small and carefully controlled set of early viewers — not a critical consensus. The finished Tomatometer could land anywhere in a wide range, and nobody scoring it has shown their hand yet. That gap between the noise and the verdict is exactly the kind of uncertainty that gets priced, argued over, and traded on well before the first official review ever posts.
The backlash showed up right on schedule
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The Odyssey has also spent months absorbing controversy that has nothing to do with anyone actually seeing the finished film. Casting choices — Nyong'o as Helen, persistent speculation about Elliot Page's role — sparked online battles long before a single public screening. Costume and set design took similar fire, with some online critics griping that the armor looked like superhero gear. It's the familiar pattern for any major blockbuster now: strong, often binary reactions hardening into place well ahead of anyone being able to judge the work itself.
Where the Markets have landed
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All of that — the hype, the backlash, the trickle of glowing informal reactions — has to resolve into a single number eventually, and over on Kalshi you can watch people try to guess it in real time. The market's current forecast for The Odyssey's Rotten Tomatoes score sits around 88 percent, and the price history is a story in itself: wild swings from the low 90s down into the 60s and back again, a chart that looks less like settled opinion and more like speculation with nothing concrete to anchor it. With reviews still embargoed, that's exactly what it is — hype and backlash standing in for data that doesn't exist yet.
The shape underneath tells you how confident the room actually is. Traders give the film strong odds of clearing the 80 mark and respectable ones of clearing 85, but the chances of it breaking 90 sit closer to a coin flip — better than even by a hair, but nowhere near a sure thing. In other words, the market expects a genuinely good Nolan film and isn't ready to call it an instant classic. Because the market resolves off the actual Tomatometer the Monday after wide release, every embargo lift and every early review between now and mid-July has real room to move those numbers — which is what makes watching it now more interesting than checking it after the fact.
For a film this secretive, this expensive, and this loaded with expectation, the only honest position is that nobody knows yet. Everything between here and July 17 is the fun part.
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This Article Is Sponsored By Kalshi, A CFTC-Regulated Prediction Market Platform. Kalshi Allows Users 18 And Older Across All 50 States To Trade On Event Outcomes Including Entertainment Markets. The Odds And Market Data Referenced In This Article Reflect Live Trading And Are Subject To Real-Time Changes. This Article Is Presented For Informational Purposes. Past Performance Of Prediction Markets Does Not Guarantee Future Results. Always Do Your Own Research Before Trading On Any Prediction Market.
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