Christopher Nolan talks Oppenheimer success and The Odyssey with Scott Pelley

Christopher Nolan has become one of the few filmmakers whose next project can move the market before a frame reaches theaters. Fresh off his first Academy Awards, won on March 10, 2024 for directing Oppenheimer and for Best Picture as a producer, Nolan will sit down with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes to talk about the film that ended an eight-nomination drought and the one that follows.

Before Oppenheimer, Nolan had spent two decades collecting Academy Award nominations without a win. That changed when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him top honors for a three-hour drama built around J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist at the center of the atomic age, with Emma Thomas and Charles Roven among the producers. CBS News has said Nolan spent the last three years living in Oppenheimer’s world, writing and directing the movie.

His next film, The Odyssey, pushes even harder toward event cinema. The adaptation of Homer’s epic stars Matt Damon as Odysseus and is scheduled to open in theaters on July 17, 2026. IMAX says the film was shot entirely with IMAX film cameras and will open in IMAX 70mm on that date, a technical choice that keeps Nolan aligned with the premium-format model he has championed for years.

Universal Pictures has treated The Odyssey as a release meant to be booked like a landmark, not a routine studio title. Advance IMAX 70mm tickets went on sale exactly a year before release, an unusually early move that underlines how much weight the industry still gives to Nolan when it comes to spectacle, format and box-office signaling.

Pelley brings his own institutional stature to the conversation. He has reported for 60 Minutes since 2004, making the interview a major-profile exchange on CBS News, and a reminder that Nolan’s influence reaches well beyond fan culture. At a moment when theatrical filmmaking is under pressure, Nolan remains a central figure in the fight to prove that scale, technology and narrative ambition can still command national attention.