The Odyssey Returns

Christopher Nolan is bringing Odysseus to Morocco. And for once, the landscape isn't pretending to be somewhere else.

His adaptation of Homer's Odyssey — scheduled for 2026 release — is the largest production in Moroccan cinema history. Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Charlize Theron. IMAX 70mm, Nolan's signature format. The scale is the kind that makes local economies rearrange themselves around a single film shoot.

The location is not accidental. It is, in fact, the point.

The Odyssey describes a journey through the western Mediterranean and beyond — past the Pillars of Hercules, into waters the Greeks considered the edge of the known world. The Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the entrance to the Underworld — Homer placed them all somewhere past the Strait of Gibraltar. Somewhere west. Somewhere wild. Somewhere that looked, in the Greek imagination, a lot like Morocco.

So Nolan is shooting where the myth always pointed. The Atlantic coast for the journey's end. The mountains for Polyphemus's cave. The ancient kasbahs for Circe's palace. The geography isn't standing in for Greece — it is playing the role Homer originally wrote for it, which gives the whole production a satisfying circularity that the Classics department would appreciate.

Morocco has played host to mythological and historical epics before — "Gladiator" built Rome here, "Game of Thrones" built Essos, "Kingdom of Heaven" built Jerusalem. But those productions used Morocco as a double, a stand-in, a face under someone else's makeup. The Odyssey is different. This time the landscape is playing itself: the western edge, the unknown, the place where heroes go to be tested and where monsters live because the Greeks needed them to live somewhere frightening, and what is more frightening than the place where the known world ends?

When the film releases, audiences will see Morocco as the ancient Greeks imagined it — the end of the earth, full of magic and danger, where a man could lose himself entirely or find his way home. That the same landscape has been playing other civilisations for Hollywood for sixty years only adds to the joke: Morocco has always been good at this. The ancients just got there first.