Oscar voters react to Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ after first screenings

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey held its first official screenings for Academy members this summer, and the early word from Variety’s voter canvass is what the film’s backers at Universal Pictures needed: a combination of awe and cautious enthusiasm that, in the particular grammar of awards season, reads as a legitimate Best Picture threat.

The screenings matter because they are the opening move in a long, expensive chess game. Studios have roughly four months between the first voter contacts and the final Oscar ballot — and the film that controls the conversation in July frequently controls it in January. The Odyssey, adapted from Homer’s ancient Greek epic by Nolan himself, has been anticipated since production photography leaked from the coasts of Morocco and the Croatian island of Hvar in 2024. With a reported budget north of $250 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal needs a best-picture campaign to justify the spend. The first screenings were designed to find out whether that campaign is realistic.

What voters are actually saying

Variety, which canvassed Academy members shortly after the screenings concluded, reported that voters used language centering on scale and ambition — the kind of adjectives that tend to precede nominations but not always wins. One voter told the outlet the film felt like “an event in the original sense,” a phrase that captures the tension in the early reaction: admiration for Nolan’s craft sitting alongside uncertainty about whether the film’s emotional register connects the way Oppenheimer did in 2023.

That comparison is both useful and limiting. Oppenheimer won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, partly because it fused spectacle with a morally urgent argument about scientific responsibility. The Odyssey is working with source material that is, by definition, episodic — a hero’s journey structured around discrete encounters rather than a mounting dramatic crisis. Several voters noted to Variety that the film’s middle section tests patience, though the consensus held that the third act recovers decisively. It’s unclear whether Nolan’s edit will change before the wide release date later this year.

The performance capturing the most attention is Matt Damon’s Odysseus, described by multiple attendees as physically and emotionally committed in ways that distinguish it from his more laconic recent work. Zendaya, cast as Athena in a choice that generated some online skepticism when announced, reportedly disarms that skepticism early and holds it at bay throughout. No formal Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes aggregate exists yet — the film has not received wide press screenings — but the voter sample Variety assembled suggests a score in the upper range would not be surprising when those numbers eventually arrive.

What ‘The Odyssey’ needs to be a real contender

Nolan has earned seven Best Director nominations from various bodies across his career and won his first Academy Award for Best Director with Oppenheimer. That history creates a specific burden: voters expect mastery. The question the early screenings raise is whether The Odyssey demonstrates growth beyond Oppenheimer or consolidates the same formal grammar. A film that looks like a director repeating himself rarely wins Best Picture twice in succession, regardless of its quality.

The awards calendar creates additional pressure. The Venice Film Festival, which opens in late August, and the Toronto International Film Festival, which follows in September, are where the Best Picture conversation typically crystallizes. If Universal submits The Odyssey to either or both festivals — a decision the studio had not publicly confirmed as of this writing — a strong reception there would convert voter curiosity into momentum. A lukewarm festival response, or a decision to skip the circuit entirely, would force the campaign to work harder through direct Academy screenings, a strategy that succeeded for Top Gun: Maverick in 2023 but is generally considered the harder path.

The craft categories look strong on paper. Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot Oppenheimer on 65mm IMAX film, serves as cinematographer again, and voters with technical backgrounds told Variety the underwater sequences — filmed in practical tanks rather than computer-generated environments — represent some of the most demanding photography attempted in recent studio filmmaking. That alone positions The Odyssey as a probable Best Cinematography contender regardless of how the above-the-line races develop.

Why this film matters beyond the Oscar race

The cultural argument for The Odyssey extends past gold statues. Hollywood’s relationship with literary and mythological source material has shifted since the pandemic years, when the industry’s tentpole slate narrowed almost entirely to franchise sequels and IP extensions. A $250-million original epic — Homer has no cinematic universe — arriving in wide release carries a thesis about what commercial cinema can still attempt. Whether or not it wins Best Picture, The Odyssey will be read as a data point in that ongoing argument.

Nolan’s position in that argument is unusual. He has spent two decades demonstrating that original-minded, technically ambitious filmmaking can generate genuine box-office returns — Inception earned $836 million worldwide in 2010, Dunkirk made $527 million on a war film with no traditional protagonist, and Oppenheimer crossed $950 million. The studios that watched those numbers have generally been willing to give him unusual latitude. The Odyssey is the largest expression of that latitude yet, and the early voter reaction suggests he has not squandered it — though “suggests” is doing real work in that sentence given how early in the process these screenings fall.

The Telluride Film Festival, which historically hosts Nolan’s late-summer premiere events, would be the logical next public checkpoint. Universal had not confirmed a Telluride slot at the time Variety published its voter canvass.

Variety and The Hollywood Reporter provided the voter reactions and production details cited above.

The next concrete signal will come from Universal’s festival strategy announcement, expected before the end of July, which will clarify how aggressively the studio intends to pursue the awards circuit rather than rely on The Odyssey‘s wide commercial release alone.