Christopher Nolan’s Historical Epic Officially Comes Home in Less Than 3 Weeks

After the success of Oppenheimer a few years ago, it’s safe to say that expectations were high coming into the year for The Odyssey, the next film from Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan. There were some skeptics who doubted that the film would be a box office hit, but these doubters were proved hilariously wrong when The Odyssey became the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history by a wide margin. The film had to overtake Deadpool & Wolverine to do it, but it eventually sank Marvel’s R-rated multiversal blowout on its way to even earning congratulations from Ryan Reynolds himself. Nolan has found so much success with his last two movies that he’s become one of the few directors in history whose films are genuine events. It doesn’t matter what his next movie is, it can safely be considered one of the most anticipated films coming in the next few years.

Not only did The Odyssey gross nearly $1.8 billion at the box office against a $250 million budget, but the film is also being eyed as a heavy favorite to win multiple Oscars, continuing a similar path laid out by Oppenheimer. The Odyssey is all but guaranteed to sweep most of the technical categories, but Matt Damon has a strong chance to take home Best Lead Actor, with other performers certainly in line for supporting performance nods as well. After being removed from over 1,000 theaters over the course of the last month as its theatrical run winds down, The Odyssey is finally set to begin the next stage of its life soon. Universal is putting the film on VOD platforms like Prime Video and Apple TV on November 17, and it’s expected to be a massive hit.

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

Here’s What We Know About Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie

There’s been no official word yet on what subject Nolan plans to tackle next, but some fans have begun to speculate that his next movie will be the first horror film of his career. Nolan praised 2026 horror hits such as Obsession and Backrooms in the lead-up to The Odyssey, admitting that he’s always had interest in tackling a film in the genre. Horror has a high rate of box office success also, often on a low budget, which could be an enticing factor for Nolan when he’s ready to jump back into directing.

Check out The Odyssey on VOD starting on November 17 and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Christopher Nolan’s future projects.

The Odyssey