Elon Musk was a man on a mission. Yes, he’s supposedly intent on colonizing Mars, or the moon, or maybe, if you give him some more time to move the goalposts, just a really, really tall mountain, but this spring, a more pressing task presented itself, a sequel to his early-2026 mission to post white supremacist rhetoric: take down Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which he decided was the latest of “woke Hollywood’s” attempts to spread racial animus (towards white people, of course) and win Oscars while doing so. Nolan, Musk explained to the trade publication Variety, was “pissing on Homer’s grave”, referring to the author of the film’s epic-poem source material.
As the final phases of the movie’s promotional campaign ramped up, Musk posted dozens of times on his self-owned social media platform with grievances related to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o (a Black woman) and Elliot Page (a trans man) in the movie, often spreading false statements about this casting existing to satisfy new Oscar requirements. (As detailed here, those new Oscar diversity requirements are extremely flexible, and often satisfied by studio-wide programs that have nothing to do with casting. The Odyssey did not need to hire Oscar winner Nyong’o to be eligible for awards.) Musk may be a divisive-at-best figure who large swaths of the population do not take seriously, but he commands enough attention and adulation from a vocal minority that plenty of online accounts were soon parroting his willful misunderstanding of Hollywood and The Odyssey. Many of them abruptly and hilariously zeroed in on the 2004 movie Troy – which the right flank of social media suddenly decided was a beloved masterpiece, rather than its own, far greater distortion of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.
This story has an ending even more familiar than a Musk-branded rocket crash: after weeks to months of rightwing outrage about the failure to select an exclusively Greek cast for a movie that also features a cyclops, sea monsters and a witch who turns men into pigs, The Odyssey has become one of the biggest hits of the summer, with over $260m in the bank already, well on its way to outgrossing the inflation-adjusted totals for Troy. (In raw dollars, it’s already made more in the US.) The rallying cries of “go woke, go broke” have been drowned out by demand to see Nolan’s fusion of old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle with less traditional forms of filming, editing and, yes, casting.
It’s easy enough to point out that any doomsaying about the prospects of The Odyssey was stubbornly ignoring a litany of factors, including but not limited to arguably the most popular movie director currently working; a cast packed with big names across generational and racial lines; the fact that casting some non-white actors doesn’t exactly scream “rigidly enforced diversity” when three of the most prominent stars in the film are Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland; and, in the week leading up to release, terrific reviews.
It would also be simple, if self-aggrandizing, to point out that for general audiences, supposedly “woke” film critics appear to serve as a powerful backstop against anti-woke clicktivism. Hence The Odyssey (95% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) being inured against controversy, whether real or imagined, while other rightwing enemies like Supergirl (53% positive), targeted for its star vaguely acknowledging the difficulties of being a woman, or Snow White (39% positive), targeted for its star being mixed-race and insufficiently deferential to the source material, having their defenses substantially weakened.
There’s probably some truth to that, though it may be less to do with critics than an increasing preference for picking winners. The online buzz that seems to affect movies more than ever isn’t so much about wokeness as a movie’s perceived status. A movie like The Odyssey or Obsession overperforms, creating more excitement about its success, causing more overperformance; a movie like Supergirl can get tagged as a loser from when the earliest box office numbers come in (so, essentially, about 12 hours after release).
Still, culture warriors love to claim victory wherever they can, so they will point to movies like Supergirl or Snow White as proof that audiences don’t want women to be superheroes, princesses to be anything other than white, or whatever other generalization they can come up with. That gloating doesn’t always tell the full story: after Snow White’s opening weekend, for example, the Hollywood trade publication Deadline – not exactly a leftwing outpost – dived deeper into the movie’s box office. Turns out, compared with the average 63-37 breakdown between “blue”-voting counties and “red”-voting counties for family films’ ticket sales, Snow White, at a 60-40 split, actually saw slightly above-average performance in red areas. Its mediocre numbers didn’t appear particularly political. “There was no red theater blockade due to any perceived controversies with Snow White,” analyst Steve Buck told Deadline at the time.
Even some of this group’s highest-profile attempts at toldja-so don’t really compute in the long run. Ten years ago, the middling numbers for an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters led to no sequels, rightwing culture warriors declaring victory, and a return to the drawing board for a more reverent legacy sequel, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The result? A princely addition of $1.1m at the domestic box office (so essentially, flat attendance; possibly a little less, given five years’ worth of inflation) and a slight downturn internationally, for a small decrease. A 2024 follow-up performed near identically. Maybe those near-uniform numbers are just the baseline levels of interest in a new Ghostbusters movie, rather than a referendum on women in ghostbusting? After all, movies from Barbie to Superman to Wicked to Sinners, all subject of various forms of rightwing grumbling about various forms of wokeness, have been big hits in recent years. This isn’t applied exclusively to rightwing-coded protests, either: Scream 7 drew angry online chatter from the left about a boycott because Melissa Barrera, star of the previous two films, was fired for speaking out about the suffering of Palestine at the hands of Israel. This did not appear to move the real-world needle, as the movie quickly became the biggest-grossing Scream yet (and without the benefit of good reviews to bolster it further).
Of course, these cases are all still just individual movies. But broader studies also suggest that audiences aren’t especially put off by diverse casts – and may, in fact, be drawn in by them. Earlier this year, UCLA’s annual Hollywood diversity report found that movies with casts between 40 and 50% Black, Indigenous and people of color (the right wing’s dreaded Bipoc) had the highest median domestic and international box office, echoing the fact that in the United States, about 45% of the population is Bipoc. This held true for the previous year’s report, too. Basically, it’s hard to find much positive evidence of woke-specific avoidance of any movie. It just isn’t something that most normal people seem to think much about.
None of this will prevent the next batch of half-manufactured, half-deluded rightwing outrage. We should be better at ignoring it by now, but given its marginal origins, people like Musk are well-positioned to amplify it into our feeds no matter how few people it represents. Meanwhile, self-styled tell-it-like-it-is doofuses like YouTuber the Critical Drinker will go back to pretending they just review movies and analyze culture, rather than trying to froth up outrage over an Oscar-winning Black actor playing a character who is beautiful. The scene will look more like Circe (Samantha Morton) massaging Odysseus’s men back into humans after transforming them into snorting hogs: “Back to your disguises,” she says drily of their human form. But maybe after the blockbuster success of this “woke” version of The Odyssey, those disguises will be a little harder to maintain.
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