As Avatar: Fire and Ash begins arriving in theaters across the globe, there's just as much excitement to see what plays before the movie as there is for the threequel itself.
An Avengers: Doomsday teaser is attached to James Cameron's blockbuster, as is a 6-minute prologue for The Odyssey on select IMAX screens. A new trailer for the latter is also thought to be playing in theaters this weekend, and while there's been a lot of chatter on social media about it leaking, we've yet to come across it.
If it really is out there, though, we'd bet on it getting an online release either next week or sometime around the New Year.
The prologue is, however, still floating around on platforms like X and TikTok. Perhaps in a bid to distract from that, Universal Pictures has just shared a new poster for The Odyssey, spotlighting the helmet that will be donned by Matt Damon's Odysseus.
The movie will follow him in the wake of the Trojan War as he makes a decade-spanning journey home to his wife, Penelope. Along the way, Odysseus faces all manner of trials and tribulations.
"Emma [Thomas] said it best when we first announced the project: it’s foundational," filmmaker Christopher Nolan recently said. "There’s a bit of everything in it. I mean, it truly contains all stories."
"As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with – Ray Harryhausen movies and other things – I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do."
"We shot over two million feet of film," Nolan said of the 91-day shoot that saw him tackle the high seas. "It’s pretty primal! I’ve been out on [the water] for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, it’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift."
"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."
The cast of The Odyssey includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal, Mia Goth, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Lupita Nyong'o, Will Yun Lee, Benny Safdie, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Corey Hawkins, Josh Stewart, Jimmy Gonzales, Maurice Compte, and Logan Marshall-Green.
"Christopher Nolan’s next film The Odyssey is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology," Universal Pictures revealed last December. "The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to Imax film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026."
The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026.