Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – about the overseas exploits of Matt Damon’s Odysseus – carries an R-rating, it’s been revealed. Update: A couple of weeks ago, we learned that Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic The Odyssey would be rather long, weighing in at 172 minutes. We’ve now learned that it will be rather violent. Or saucy. ... The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan epic is R-rated
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – about the overseas exploits of Matt Damon’s Odysseus – carries an R-rating, it’s been revealed.
Update: A couple of weeks ago, we learned that Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic The Odyssey would be rather long, weighing in at 172 minutes. We’ve now learned that it will be rather violent. Or saucy. Or perhaps saucy and violent.
Variety reports that Nolan’s summer blockbuster will carry an R-rating – the same classification as his previous film, Oppenheimer, with its assorted bedroom scenes. Before that, Nolan’s films were mostly rated PG-13 – such hits as Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight and even the war drama Dunkirk all carried that rating. You have to go back to the earlier works Insomnia and Memento to find more R-rated Nolans.
Although The Odyssey doesn’t have an MPA entry yet, at least that we can find, it is listed on TCL Chinese Theatres’ website, where it shows a ‘Restricted’ certification.
As Variety notes, with a reported budget of $250m, The Odyssey could even be the most expensive R-rated film ever made. It’s a sign of how much clout the British filmmaker has in Hollywood, and also perhaps a sign of changing times – Deadpool & Wolverine was an R-rated hit, and audiences are flocking to such full-blooded delights as Backrooms and Obsession.
Time will tell whether The Odyssey can match the (almost) $1bn success of Oppenheimer. The Odyssey is in cinemas from the 17th July 2026.
Our previous story follows…
22nd May 2026: Director Christopher Nolan had previously said in April that his mythological epic The Odyssey would be shorter then his bomb-making drama, Oppenheimer. It now looks as though that statement’s true – but only just.
Overnight, the AMC Theatres cinema chain published on its website that The Odyssey has a runtime of 172 minutes – that’s two hours and 52 minutes.
The detail was spotted by World of Reel before someone, presumably, got an angry phone call from someone connected to the movie and the runtime was taken down again. A quick hunt around the internet finds all sorts of screengrabs, though, so unless the duration’s flat-out wrong, it really does look as though Nolan’s Homercore drama will come in at just under the three hour mark.
Inevitably, there have been comparisons with the lengths of other Nolan joints. The Odyssey is shorter than the filmmaker’s longest outing, Oppenheimer, which was three hours long, but still longer than any of his Batmans, or Interstellar.
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The Odyssey is even shorter than Tenet, which did that classic Christopher Nolan thing of playing around with our perception of time; it felt like it lasted for about four hours, but in fact only came in at two hours and 30 minutes.
Nolan’s story of the Greek king Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his fantastical exploits overseas is also less interminable than the Online Discourse surrounding it. The past few months have seen the internet fill up with exhausting arguments and complaints about everything from The Odyssey’s historical accuracy to its casting.
We can only imagine what would happen if a film like Jason And The Argonauts came out in 2026.
They didn’t have stop motion animation in Ancient Greece! What, do these filmmakers think we’re idiots??
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Ahem.
The Odyssey is in cinemas from the 17th July 2026.
