‘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.