Christopher Nolan has said the follow-up to The Odyssey won’t be coming for “at least” three years.

• READ MORE: ‘The Odyssey’ review: cinema may have peaked with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster epic

The director’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem hit cinemas on Friday (July 17), quickly becoming Nolan’s best-reviewed film. It stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, who embarks on a treacherous journey home after the Trojan War.

Also on board are Tom Holland as his son Telemachus and Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, alongside Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Samantha Morton and Mia Goth.

The director and producer recently appeared on Today and detailed how challenging it was to pull off the masterpiece after conceptualizing the film for two decades.

“Now, I can get something made that I couldn’t otherwise get made. For me to take on Greek mythology on a big modern cinematic canvas is something that hasn’t been done,” Nolan said.

The film is Nolan’s first since unexpected box-office hit Oppenheimer, which earned the director his first-ever Oscar amid seven wins in total. Fans had to wait three years for Nolan’s return with The Odyssey, and, when asked if that pattern would continue and it would be “another three years” before his next release, Nolan replied: “Oh, at least.”

“I definitely hit the limits of my own stamina and everybody’s stamina, I think. I mean, it’s The Odyssey, of course it should be difficult,” he continued. “We’re not doing the job right making a film of ‘The Odyssey’ if it doesn’t seem difficult.”

He recalled warning Damon that filming the near three-hour film would be tough, something Nolan said he suspected he “didn’t really understand until we got on the boat”.

“It’s not until you get there and you start, you know, hiking up a goat’s path to cyclops’ cave,” he said, adding that Damon had “a sort of slow creeping realization” that filming was “not going to be easy”.

In a nod to the sheer scale of the film, NME’s Paul Bradshaw also awarded the blockbuster five stars, writing: “Cinema may have peaked with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster epic” adding “this mind-boggling adventure should be seen on the big screen”.

Elsewhere, Nolan responded to the backlash over some of the casting choices in The Odyssey this week, calling it “irrelevant”.

His comments came after the casting of Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra drew backlash from the likes of Elon Musk, while others have criticised Travis Scott’s role as a bard and Page’s casting as the Greek soldier Sinon.

Nyong’o has also previously dismissed the criticism, emphasising that the film is adapting “a mythological story”.

The comments come after Nolan recently explained why he opted for modern English dialogue in The Odyssey, saying he wanted to find “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people”, opting for contemporary accents and dialogue over a more theatrical approach.

Nolan also recently revealed that Samantha Morton’s performance as the goddess Circe earned an ovation on set that reminded him of Heath Ledger’s work on The Dark Knight.