Movies Like The Odyssey: 10 Epics to Watch Next (2026)
Loved Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey? Here are 10 films that capture the same myth, scale and long journey home, with where to watch each one in the UK.
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You have seen it, probably on the biggest screen you could find, and now you want more of the same feeling. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the film of the summer, a myth as old as Western storytelling told on the largest canvas modern cinema allows. When the credits roll, most people want the same thing: another journey, another impossible scale, another hero trying to get home against everything the world can throw at him. Here are ten films that scratch that itch, and where you can watch each one in the UK tonight.
What Nolan’s The Odyssey actually is
If you have not caught it yet, the short version: The Odyssey is Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, and it follows Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, on his ten-year struggle to sail home from the Trojan War to his wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, and his son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland. Zendaya plays the goddess Athena, and Robert Pattinson turns up as one of the suitors circling Penelope back home. The ensemble around them is enormous, with Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton and John Leguizamo among the names.
The reason it plays so big is partly technical. It is the first narrative feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, and Nolan pushed for an IMAX 70mm release so rare that only around two dozen screens in the United States can show it that way, which turned booking a ticket into its own event. It released on 17 July 2026, runs 173 minutes, and opened to some of the best reviews of Nolan’s career, sitting around 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, with the biggest opening weekend of any film he has made. Ludwig Goransson wrote the score and Hoyte van Hoytema shot it, the same team behind Oppenheimer.
The story underneath all that spectacle is 2,700 years old, and it is the reason this list is possible. The Odyssey invented the shape that dozens of later films borrow: a warrior tries to get home, and the getting home is the whole story.
How we picked these
We were not looking only for Greek myth, though there is plenty of that here. We were looking for the things The Odyssey actually does. The long voyage home. The war that comes before the peace. The gods, or fate, or something larger than the hero pulling the strings. The temptations and monsters that test who a person really is. Some of these films share the setting, some share only the feeling, and one of them is literally the Odyssey with a banjo. All ten are ranked by how well they capture the itch, and each one tells you exactly where to watch it in the UK.
10 movies like The Odyssey
Troy (2004)
- Runtime
- 163 min
- Director
- Wolfgang Petersen
- Genre
- War, Action, History
- Starring
- Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Eric Bana
Watch it for the war that starts the whole story.
This is the war The Odyssey remembers. Troy dramatises the ten-year siege that Odysseus helps win before his long journey home even begins, with Brad Pitt’s Achilles, the doomed love that starts it all, and the wooden horse that ends it. Watch this first and Nolan’s film reads almost like a sequel: what happens to the men who survive the fall of a city and then have to find their way back across the sea. It is the most direct companion piece on this list.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
- Runtime
- 107 min
- Director
- Joel Coen
- Genre
- Adventure, Comedy, Crime
- Starring
- George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson
Watch it for the myth retold with a sense of humour.
The Odyssey with a bluegrass soundtrack. The Coen brothers move Homer to Depression-era Mississippi, with George Clooney as a fast-talking escaped convict trying to get home to his wife before she marries someone else. The one-eyed conman, the sirens by the river, the blind prophet on the railway: they are all here, played for warmth and comedy rather than grandeur. It is the clearest proof that this story bends to fit any time and place, and it is a joy from start to finish.
Where to watch (UK)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- Runtime
- 149 min
- Director
- Stanley Kubrick
- Genre
- Sci-Fi, Mystery, Adventure
- Starring
- Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Watch it for the voyage into the unknown.
The other great Odyssey, and one Nolan has pointed to for years. Kubrick swaps the wine-dark sea for deep space, but the shape of the thing is identical: a voyage into the unknown, a crew at the mercy of forces far larger than themselves, and an ending that abandons plot for pure, overwhelming awe. It is slow and demanding in a way modern blockbusters rarely dare to be. If The Odyssey’s scale and strangeness stayed with you, this is where a lot of that ambition comes from.
The Northman (2022)
- Runtime
- 137 min
- Director
- Robert Eggers
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Fantasy
- Starring
- Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang
Watch it for the fate-driven revenge epic.
If it was the violence, the prophecy and the sense of fate that gripped you, Robert Eggers’s Norse epic is the closest modern match. A prince crosses the sea to avenge his murdered father, driven by ritual and prophecy through mud, blood and hallucination. Eggers takes myth seriously as myth, with none of the winking that usually creeps into films like this. It is brutal and often beautiful, and it treats an ancient revenge story with exactly the weight Nolan gives Homer.
Gladiator (2000)
- Runtime
- 155 min
- Director
- Ridley Scott
- Genre
- Action, Drama, Adventure
- Starring
- Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen
Watch it for the warrior’s long road home.
Ridley Scott’s Roman epic runs on the same engine as The Odyssey: a soldier trying to get home to a wife and son he may never see again. Russell Crowe’s Maximus loses everything and fights his way back toward a memory of home that keeps receding in front of him. The homecoming that never quite arrives is the most Odyssean idea in cinema, and few films land it as hard as this one. It is also just a tremendous piece of old-fashioned spectacle.
Where to watch (UK)
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
- Runtime
- 138 min
- Director
- Peter Weir
- Genre
- Adventure, Drama, War
- Starring
- Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy
Watch it for the sea voyage itself.
The purest sea voyage here. Peter Weir puts you aboard a ship at the edge of the known world and lets the journey itself carry the film, which is really about command, loyalty and the long haul of a crossing with no easy end. There are no gods and no monsters, but the feeling of small men against a vast and indifferent ocean is exactly the mood The Odyssey lives in. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find, with the sound up.
The Green Knight (2021)
- Runtime
- 130 min
- Director
- David Lowery
- Genre
- Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
- Starring
- Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton
Watch it for the hero tested at every turn.
A mythic quest told as a slow, strange fever dream. Dev Patel’s Gawain rides out to honour a bargain that will very likely kill him, and every stop along the way is a test of who he actually is rather than a fight to win. It sits closer to the temptations and trials of Odysseus than to the battlefield films around it. Beautiful, unsettling and open to interpretation, it rewards patience and a second watch.
Where to watch (UK)
300 (2006)
- Runtime
- 117 min
- Director
- Zack Snyder
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, War
- Starring
- Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West
Watch it for the myth at full volume.
The most stylised film on this list, and the one that leans hardest into spectacle. Zack Snyder turns the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae into a comic-book fresco of slow motion, shouting and impossible physiques. Subtle it is not. But the mythic-scale bravado, the sense of men becoming legend in the retelling, is a real part of what The Odyssey plays with, and few films commit to that idea as fully as this one does.
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
- Runtime
- 104 min
- Director
- Don Chaffey
- Genre
- Adventure, Family, Fantasy
- Starring
- Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack, Gary Raymond
Watch it for the classic mythic sea voyage.
The original Greek-myth voyage movie, and still the most charming. Ray Harryhausen’s hand-animated skeletons, harpies and bronze giant are the direct ancestors of every creature in The Odyssey’s world, and they still work because someone built them by hand and cared. It is gentler and creakier than everything else here, but watch it to see where all of this began, and to remember that spectacle predates the computer.
Where to watch (UK)
Oppenheimer (2023)
- Runtime
- 181 min
- Director
- Christopher Nolan
- Genre
- Drama, History
- Starring
- Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon
Watch it for the same director at the same scale.
Nolan’s previous film, and the clearest guide to what he does with a true story on the largest possible canvas. Critics have drawn a straight line from its haunted, guilt-ridden final act to the ending of The Odyssey, and both films are as interested in the cost of a legend as in the legend itself. If what you want is more of this exact director working at this exact scale, there is nowhere better to go next.
Where to watch (UK)
The 10 at a glance
| Film | Year | Director | Rating | Where to watch (UK) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Troy | 2004 | Wolfgang Petersen | 7.2 | HBO Max, Now |
| O Brother, Where Art Thou? | 2000 | Joel Coen | 7.3 | Rent or buy |
| 2001: A Space Odyssey | 1968 | Stanley Kubrick | 8.0 | HBO Max |
| The Northman | 2022 | Robert Eggers | 7.0 | Netflix |
| Gladiator | 2000 | Ridley Scott | 8.2 | Rent or buy |
| Master and Commander | 2003 | Peter Weir | 7.2 | Disney+ |
| The Green Knight | 2021 | David Lowery | 6.6 | Prime Video |
| 300 | 2006 | Zack Snyder | 7.2 | HBO Max, Now |
| Jason and the Argonauts | 1963 | Don Chaffey | 7.2 | Rent or buy |
| Oppenheimer | 2023 | Christopher Nolan | 8.0 | Rent or buy |
Streaming and rental options change often. The list above was checked against live UK provider data in late July 2026, so if a film has moved by the time you read this, renting it is the reliable fallback. Several of these titles stream on HBO Max, which only launched as a standalone UK service earlier this year, so if you are new to it our HBO Max UK guide covers the prices and the ways in.
Where to watch The Odyssey itself
For now, the only place to see The Odyssey is a cinema, which is exactly where Nolan wants you. It was built for the biggest screen you can reach, and an IMAX presentation is worth the trip if one is running near you. A digital release will follow later in the year, and as with Nolan’s other films it will most likely arrive to buy or rent first, before it settles onto a subscription service further down the line. Given that Universal made it, keep an eye on the usual rental stores and then the streaming platforms toward the back end of 2026.
In the meantime, the ten films above are the next best thing: the same journey, the same scale, and the same very old idea that the way home is never a straight line. If space epics are more your thing than sword and sandal, our companion list of movies like Interstellar points the same instinct at the stars.
Frequently asked questions
What is Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey about?
It is Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, following the Greek hero Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, on his ten-year journey home from the Trojan War to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. It keeps the shape of the ancient poem: a soldier trying to get home while gods, monsters and his own choices keep getting in the way.
Where can I watch The Odyssey (2026)?
In cinemas. The Odyssey released on 17 July 2026 and was made for the big screen, shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, so a cinema and ideally an IMAX screen is the way to see it first. A streaming or digital release will follow later in the year, most likely to buy or rent before it lands on a subscription service.
Is The Odyssey based on the Homer poem?
Yes. It adapts Homer's Odyssey, one of the oldest surviving works of Western literature, written roughly 2,700 years ago. The bones of the story are the same: Odysseus takes ten years to sail home from the fall of Troy, meeting the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens and Calypso along the way while Penelope holds off suitors at home.
What movie is most like The Odyssey?
Troy is the closest companion, because it tells the story of the Trojan War that comes right before The Odyssey. For the myth retold in a completely different style, O Brother, Where Art Thou? moves it to 1930s America, and 2001: A Space Odyssey turns the same voyage-into-the-unknown idea into science fiction.
Is The Odyssey worth watching in IMAX?
If you can get to a screen showing it properly, yes. It is the first narrative feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, and the IMAX 70mm presentation is deliberately rare, with only a handful of equipped screens. It earned some of the best reviews of Nolan's career and the biggest opening weekend of any of his films, and the scale is a large part of why.
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