The already impressive cast of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has got even more stacked in the last week, with the official announcement that Elliot Page and Himesh Patel have signed up, and rumours circulating that Mia Goth is “in talks” to join them. Here’s everything else we know about what is almost certainly going to be the biggest film of 2026, from “new Imax technology” to the fact that it’s based on some kind of poem.

Tom Holland is playing the lead, allegedly

This is a big opportunity for Holland to prove his mettle as a leading man. Playing Spiderman, he has starred in some of the most commercially successful films of all time, but whether or not these films are good is a different question, and his ventures outside of Marvel have so far been patchy: Uncharted, while it did well at the box office, was slated by critics, as was Cherry, a dreary military drama on Apple TV which it’s hard to believe many people actually watched. Starring as the lead in a Christopher Nolan film is a step up, particularly now that Nolan’s stock is running so high – this could be the role that proves Holland has what it takes to be a proper movie star... But we don’t actually know what that role is yet: even if it’s the lead it could either be Odysseus or his son, Telemachus, who plays an active role in the original narrative.

It has an unbelievably good ensemble cast

We don’t know who is playing who yet but we do know that the cast includes some fresh Nolan collaborators, like Zendaya (Holland’s real-life partner), Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong’o, as well as some familiar faces, including Matt Damon, who previously worked with Nolan on Interstellar; Anne Hatheway (The Dark Knight Rises); Benny Safie (Oppenheimer) and Elliot Page (Inception). What a terrrible waste it will be if Mia Goth doesn’t get to play some kind of freaky, ethereal sea nymph.

It’s based on a somewhat obscure Greek poem called The Odyssey 

When the news was first announced, content creator Matt Ramos was mercilessly roasted on Twitter for posting a screenshot of a Google summary of the Odyssey as though this were new information, which led to days of discourse over whether or not it’s embarrassing never to have heard of one of Western civilisation's foundational texts. Of course, sophisticates like you and I have seen The Simpsons parody episode and know exactly what it’s about: while returning home to Ithaca from the Trojan war, Odysseus gets blown off-course by Poseidon and ends up on an epic, decade-long quest which includes nymphs, sirens, sea monsters,  one-eyed giants, and men getting turned into pigs – all the while, Moe, Carl and Lennie are back on Ithaca trying to seduce Oydysseus’s wife, Marge. There is a lot of material here for a big, bombastic Hollywood epic.

It’s going to be a huge production

After the runaway success of Oppenheimer, Nolan has a blank cheque to do whatever he wants and it seems like he’s cashing it in. According to Universal’s press release, The Odyssey will be shot using “brand new IMAX film technology” and filmed in locations all over the world, including Morocco, the UK and the Sicilian island of Favignan. Say what you like about Nolan but he’s not going to subject us to a series of green screens.