Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is meeting the internet’s favorite boycott test: people are buying tickets anyway. Despite a loud right-wing campaign on X against the film, early box office tracking cited by Deadline points to a roughly $200 million worldwide opening, with IMAX screenings sold out in multiple U.S. markets.
The fight around the movie started before most viewers could judge the thing on a screen. WIRED reported that some X users attacked Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic over the casting of Black and trans actors, Matt Damon playing Odysseus, American-accented dialogue, ship designs, and Tom Holland saying “dad” in the trailer. Elon Musk helped amplify the backlash on X, according to Variety.
That is a familiar machine: find a culture-war angle, flatten a movie into a loyalty test, then treat ticket buying as a referendum on civilization. The available data so far does not show that the machine is winning.
Demand is showing up where it counts
Rotten Tomatoes lists The Odyssey with a 96 percent critics’ score. Some of the film’s online critics have called that reception evidence of a “woke conspiracy,” according to WIRED, and others urged users to downvote the trailers or avoid the movie.
Theaters are telling a different story. Deadline reported that advance sales point toward a $200 million global debut. Forbes reported that such an opening would make The Odyssey Nolan’s strongest launch for a film outside his Batman entries. Forbes also reported that some resale listings for tickets reached $1,000 after disruptions hit ticketing systems at AMC and Fandango.
The scarcity is especially sharp around 70mm IMAX screenings, the format Nolan has long pushed as the preferred way to see his films. Variety reported that fans were traveling across state lines for those showings. The Guardian reported similar demand around London’s BFI IMAX. Gulte reported that one California woman delayed her pregnancy plans to avoid missing an opening-weekend IMAX 70mm screening.
WIRED contributor John Semley also described a more mundane version of the frenzy: he drove from Philadelphia to a suburban theater for an 8 a.m. 70mm IMAX screening, only to find the show canceled after a power outage. Staff at the King of Prussia Regal Cinema wrote down ticket numbers by hand for refunds and gave out vouchers, according to Semley.
The backlash has a backup product
The anti-Nolan crowd may still get an alternate Odyssey. Variety reported that AI film studio Fountain 0 plans to release a fully AI-generated version of Homer’s story, timed to feed off the attention around Nolan’s film and the criticism of it.
That announcement says plenty about the split here. Nolan’s movie is being sold as a three-hour, large-format theatrical event with movie stars and mythological spectacle. Fountain 0’s project is being positioned around the heat of the argument itself. One asks people to leave the house and sit in a room with a projector. The other can ride the churn of outrage, which is cheaper than building a boat and hiring Matt Damon.
For now, the boycott campaign has produced posts, trailer downvotes, and accusations about Western culture. The measurable audience behavior reported by Deadline, Forbes, Variety, and theater demand points the other way: people are paying, traveling, and fighting ticket queues to see Nolan’s The Odyssey on the biggest screens they can find.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
