Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming ‘The Odyssey’ (Photo credit: Universal Pictures)
Christopher Nolan used more than two million feet of film for his upcoming movie The Odyssey, which will be released in IMAX theaters in July 2026.
Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey is set to make cinematic history as the first major Hollywood feature to be shot entirely using IMAX film cameras. In a new feature interview with Empire magazine, Nolan revealed just how much film was used to shoot the feature — which the director finished shooting in August.
“We shot over two million feet of film,” Nolan says of the The Odyssey shoot, which filmed over 91 days this year.
Variety reports that, per Kodak, a foot of 65mm film costs about $1.50 — putting the production’s raw film stock at roughly $3 million. Nolan adds that the shoot for The Odyssey took place primarily at sea.
“I’ve been out on [the sea] for the last four months,” he adds in the interview with Empire magazine. ‘We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’s ship out there on the real waves, in the real places… We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.”
Nolan’s long-standing love affair with IMAX film cameras is widely known, with the technology used in The Dark Knight, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer. IMAX cameras have traditionally been viewed as too large, too loud, and too difficult to operate for use throughout an entire production. That changed after Nolan directly challenged IMAX to address these limitations.
In the same interview, Nolan says that he and The Odyssey cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, his long-time collaborator, were able to shoot the full film on IMAX cameras. This was made possible by a new IMAX camera casing called the “blimp.” The housing is designed to sharply reduce the noise that IMAX cameras typically generate.
In the past, Nolan and van Hoytema used IMAX mainly for action sequences because the cameras were too noisy to record dialogue at close range. The new “blimp” housing was created to address this issue, cutting the camera noise to a level suitable for dialogue scenes.
“The blimp system is a game-changer,” Nolan tells the publication. “You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound. What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”
In the same feature, which is slated for Empire magazine’s January 2026 issue, van Hoytema explains that he filmed IMAX test footage of a child reciting the lyrics to David Bowie’s song Sound and Vision to demonstrate to Nolan that the newly blimped IMAX film cameras could cleanly record dialogue.
“I presented Chris with a very big close-up of a child on the IMAX screen, reciting David Bowie’s ‘Sound And Vision’ from a piece of paper,” van Hoytema says. “It was very touching: that level of intimacy in both image and sound, fused together, projected in the theater.”
