Sing, muse, of the cunning Christopher Nolan, who has once again achieved the impossible. His new adaptation of The Odyssey has earned rapturous reviews, a coveted “A” CinemaScore from audiences, and the best non-Batman-related opening of Nolan’s career. It’s on track to net more than $120 million domestically and more than $137 million from international markets, per The Hollywood Reporter. That means the film has earned back its reported $250 million production budget without breaking a sweat, and is on track for its box office to reach Olympus-high heights.
Only a cyclops living in a cave could possibly be surprised by this news. Nolan’s been on a hot streak for the past two decades. His last film, a three-hour biopic about a communist-sympathizing physicist losing his security clearance, made nearly $1 billion. The Odyssey—a starry, action-packed, modern spin on one of western civilization’s oldest stories—is both more accessible and more inherently commercial than Oppenheimer was. It would be shocking if Nolan’s latest work didn’t earn even more money than that best picture winner did.
That said, there are two notable takeaways from The Odyssey’s dominance. One: Nolan doesn’t need a Barbenheimer-style grassroots phenomenon to sell tickets. And two: Social media noise is not real life.
Perhaps a handful of trolls—a small group that includes the richest man in the world—has sworn off Nolan’s film because its cast has the audacity to feature both a Black woman and a trans man. But loud as their voices may be, the actual grosses prove that they couldn’t dampen The Odyssey’s prospects. One could take this outcome as evidence that the right-wing campaign against the film actually helped it by turning the film into a liberal cause célèbre, if one were interested in being wrong. The real truth is that normal people, regular folks whose brains haven’t been pickled by constant exposure to the worst opinions on the internet, are unaware of this manufactured controversy. And even if they have heard about it, they certainly aren’t letting it influence their viewing habits.
In a just world, one governed by logic and reason—by Zeus’s law!—The Odyssey’s success would also put to bed an old conservative bugbear: the notion that Hollywood movies bomb when they’re overly influenced by the politics and qualities this cohort defines as “woke,” a concept so broad as to be essentially meaningless. This idea, rendered later as a pithy catchphrase—”go woke, go broke”—dates back roughly to the intense, misogynistic backlash to Paul Feig’s all-female 2016 Ghostbusters reboot. A wave that, in retrospect, feels like a harbinger for where that year’s presidential election was heading.
Ghostbusters was indeed a financial disappointment; the movie lost millions of dollars, killing a potential franchise in its cradle. But Ghostbusters didn’t fail because it was “woke.” It failed because it was a bad movie, an only fitfully funny action comedy that couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be or say.
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