Matt Damon's Star-Studded Sci-Fi Epic Officially Makes a Major Streaming Comeback

After years of being Christopher Nolan‘s bridesmaid but never his bride, featuring in ensemble roles in the likes of Interstellar and the Best Picture-winning biopic Oppenheimer, Matt Damon finally got the chance to take the spotlight for the director in his most ambitious film yet, an adaptation of Homer‘s The Odyssey. Of course, as with any Nolan film, Damon is far from the only big star involved. The cast also features Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Zendaya, and more, with Anne Hathaway likely to get a Best Supporting Actress nod for her role as the wife of Damon’s King of Ithaca, Penelope.

Hathaway’s potential nomination is one of many the film has been touted to achieve, with some even predicting it will beat the nominations record set earlier this year by Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners. This comes following The Odyssey‘s incredible box office run this summer and beyond, with the film earning more than $1.7 billion worldwide and becoming the 11th highest-grossing film of all time worldwide. It is also Nolan’s biggest movie of all time, overtaking his only other billion-dollar hits, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.

As the sparkle on The Odyssey’s record-breaking theatrical run fades, attention has turned to another Damon hit. 2011’s Contagion, the viral pandemic thriller which has become a new eerily realistic watch following the events of 2020, is currently the second-most-viewed movie on HBO Max in the world. Also featuring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, and more, Steven Soderbergh‘s thriller is a big hit once again after scoring a respectable $137 million at the 2011 box office.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

What’s the Most-Watched Movie on HBO Max?

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If it weren’t for a 2026 horror movie, Contagion would be topping the global HBO Max charts. Instead, the streaming crown goes to Infested director Sébastien Vaniček‘s Evil Dead Burn, the sixth movie in the Evil Dead franchise that, of course, features a cameo by Bruce Campbell. The movie turned its reported $20 million production budget into more than $70 million in a quietly strong theatrical run earlier this year, before becoming one of this Halloween’s most popular streaming titles.

Contagion is a streaming hit on HBO Max. Stay tuned to Collider for more streaming stories.

Contagion