Tom Cruise Has Seen The Odyssey And He’s Already Ready to Go Again

When Tom Cruise tells you a film needs to be seen in a cinema, you listen.

The actor, producer, stuntman and unofficial global ambassador for the big-screen experience has given Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey his enthusiastic seal of approval following an early screening of the hugely anticipated epic.

Cruise shared a photograph of himself proudly holding his ticket outside an IMAX 70mm cinema, alongside a message thanking Nolan, producer Emma Thomas and the film’s enormous cast and crew.

“Thank you for an amazing night in a movie theater,” Cruise wrote. “I can’t wait to see it again!” That last line may be the most important.

This is not simply a celebrity offering polite support to another celebrity. Cruise and Nolan are arguably the two most powerful defenders of theatrical cinema working today. Neither makes films designed to be half-watched on a laptop while someone scrolls through their phone. They create events. Films built to be seen in packed cinemas, projected onto the biggest possible screen, with the sound turned up and the outside world temporarily switched off.

And The Odyssey may be Nolan’s most ambitious cinema experience yet.

The film adapts Homer’s ancient Greek epic, with Matt Damon starring as Odysseus, the king attempting to return home to Ithaca following the Trojan War. Waiting for him are his wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, and their son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland.

Naturally, this being a Christopher Nolan film, the supporting cast is ridiculous. Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, Travis Scott and Charlize Theron are among the names joining Damon on his dangerous journey through gods, monsters, war and temptation.

Early critical reaction has been extremely strong. But the real selling point may be the way Nolan has chosen to bring this story to the screen. The Odyssey is reportedly the first feature film shot entirely using IMAX 70mm film cameras. That makes the cinema experience more than a recommendation. It is effectively part of the film itself. Cruise understands that better than almost anyone. He famously refused to release Top Gun: Maverick directly onto streaming during the pandemic, choosing instead to wait until audiences could return to cinemas. It proved to be a spectacular decision. The film eventually grossed almost $1.5 billion worldwide and helped remind audiences why some films deserve to be seen collectively on the biggest screen available.

Cruise also has a long history of championing other filmmakers and releases, publicly supporting everything from Nolan’s Tenet and Oppenheimer to Sinners, Twisters, F1: The Movie and Disclosure Day. His endorsement will only increase the excitement surrounding The Odyssey.

Meanwhile, Cruise is preparing for his own dramatic transformation in Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. The first trailer revealed the actor almost completely unrecognisable beneath heavy prosthetics ahead of its cinema release on 2 October.

For now, though, even Tom Cruise is simply another excited film fan holding a ticket. And if The Odyssey has left cinema’s greatest champion desperate to watch it again, we suspect a lot of audiences are about to feel exactly the same way.