'The Odyssey's toughest Oscar rival? Polymarket says it's an unlikely film
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey leads the Oscar conversation, even as a surprise Best Picture challenger gathers real momentum.
Thirty-four days before she reported to prison in 2023, Elizabeth Holmes opened her home — and her camera-ready defenses — to filmmaker-comedian Nathan Fielder. The result, the A24 documentary You Can See Everything from Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim, has turned into the season’s curveball: it opened October 16 and is sitting at 98% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
On prediction market Polymarket, an October snapshot had the film running second in the 2027 Best Picture betting at nearly 25%. The front-runner, at roughly 45%, is The Odyssey — Christopher Nolan ’s summer behemoth. These are traders’ odds, not Academy votes, and the Oscars haven’t announced nominations.
Universal says Nolan’s monster-slaying, storm- dodging take on Homer — with Matt Damon as Odysseus — has not only conquered multiplexes but also critics, sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Universal says The Odyssey has surpassed $1.7 billion worldwide — Nolan’s biggest box-office hit.
The challenger isn’t a standard true-crime recap. Fielder (of The Rehearsal) and Oppenheim followed Holmes — the Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors — as she and partner Billy Evans brought cameras into their daily life, apparently to put forward their side. Over three years, the project morphs from access doc to something more slippery, with Fielder’s probing of image-making and on-camera truth turning the film into a hall of mirrors.
Nolan’s next move
Nolan hasn’t announced his next directing gig. In July, he told NBC’s Today that making The Odyssey left his team spent and he expects at least three years before he directs another movie — not shocking after mounting an ancient epic on IMAX.
That downtime hasn’t stopped fans from floating a diabolical follow-up: Dante’s Inferno. Given how Polyphemus’s cave played like survival horror, Circe’s transformations induced queasy dread, and the trek toward the underworld chilled the air, you can imagine Nolan’s enormous-screen tactility tackling nine circles of Hell, a frozen Lucifer, and punishments that mirror earthly sins.
For now, it’s all speculation — and one very real race between a billion-dollar epic and a late-breaking A24 documentary with serious momentum.