‘The Odyssey’ Backlash Failed Tremendously

On the day of its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, at one of the few remaining cinemas in the northeast equipped to screen large-format, super-high-resolution 70-mm IMAX movies.

I arrived to find clusters of idlers in “NOLAN” sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, grousing outside the theater. The power had gone out, and the 8 am screening of The Odyssey would have to be canceled. Stressed-out employees manually jotted down ticket numbers in order to issue refunds (when the computers were back up and running) and handed out vouchers, apologetically. Filmgoers groaned about not being able to see the film—in its intended format, at the earliest possible time—and about wasting a day’s worth of PTO. A thought crossed my mind: Maybe it was sabotage?

Threats against Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Homeric epic have dogged the movie, basically since its announcement. A certain class of terminally online right-wingers—legitimated and amplified by no less than Elon Musk, on his own echo-chamber social media platform—have been pulling their oars against the movie, and the prevailing tide of public enthusiasm for it. For a bunch of mostly stupid reasons—the casting of Black and trans actors, or of Matt Damon as wily Odysseus; the Americanized English dialect; the ahistorical ship designs; the fact that Tom Holland says “dad” in the trailer—many had written The Odyssey off, sight unseen, as nothing short of a “psyop" designed to undermine Western culture. One X user lambasted Nolan as an enemy of “the west.”

Even the nearly unanimous good reviews (The Odyssey currently holds a 96 percent Critic’s Score on Rotten Tomatoes) were seen as part of a “woke conspiracy.” These self-appointed Odyssey haters conspired to downvote the movie’s trailers and generally campaign against seeing the movie.

But there was no sabotage at the King of Prussia Regal Cinema. The local power grid map shows dozens of similar outages across the region, attributable to recent bouts of extreme weather. And I was told this cinema, specifically, had been suffering from outages in recent weeks.

Bracketing a few hundred early-morning soldiers of cinema turned away from a multiplex, and a few thousands dollars in lost revenue for the theater, the boycott against The Odyssey is shaping up to be a tremendous failure. Early ticket sales—including IMAX screenings sold out across the country—are indicating a $200 million worldwide box office return. This would make it the most profitable opening for any of Christopher Nolan’s movies that don’t feature the character Batman. Resale markets have seen tickets fetching $1,000—for a movie! It wouldn’t be shocking if The Odyssey clears a billion dollars, globally, when all is said and done.

People are booking off work to see the movie. Die-hards are crossing state lines, and national borders, to see the movie on the biggest screens possible. A story circulated earlier this week of a California woman who delayed her pregnancy so as not to spoil the chance of seeing the movie, opening weekend, on IMAX 70-mm. I myself traveled about an hour-and-change round-trip only to not see it.

The disjoint between the anti-Odyssey backlash and the film’s actual, organic fandom is revealing. Despite the best efforts by some of the world’s worst people, you just can’t quell the basic human desire to see big-name actors on enormous screens, battling enormous monsters and bedding down with witches. You can downvote a trailer. But you cannot downvote the dreams of the larger moviegoing public.

It speaks to just how cavernous the chasm is between certain elements of The Discourse and reality itself. Maybe they should have picked a more modest target to derail, and not a filmmaker whose movies, whatever one thinks of them, are pretty much synonymous with “making money.”

So much of this culture war jockeying exists purely online, to sustain an infrastructure of monetized outrage that is increasingly preoccupied with Western chauvinism, racism, and just plain antisocial weirdness. It reminds me of a favorite Simpsons joke, where Marge bakes Homer (the other one) a fake cake to ruin so that he won’t destroy Maggie’s real birthday cake. X is the fake cake.

All is not lost for the anti-Nolanites, however. Earlier week, it was announced that AI film studio Fountain 0 is releasing a completely AI-generated Odyssey movie, to cash-in on both the excitement around Nolan’s movie and the backlash.

It feels like a concession to the haters. Real movie fans can have a real, three-hour IMAX action blockbuster. The armchair defenders of Western civilization can hate on Nolan and get their Odyssey fix with some rushed-to-streaming AI slop—a rare chance for them to have their fake cake and eat it too.