We are just ten days away from its theatrical release, but the backlash against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey does not seem to subside.
Universal Pictures released the movie’s ‘official countdown trailer’ (confusing terminology to everyone) on 1 July. While YouTube has not been displaying the dislike counter publicly on its website for about five years now, third-party plugins exist that record their user’s ratings of videos, then estimate the total number proportionate to the publicly available like count.
Users with such plugins have captured the number of dislikes outnumbering the number of likes by a wide margin. For instance, one user on Reddit posted a screenshot on 5 July showing 59,000 likes and 402,000 dislikes on The Odyssey’s latest trailer uploaded to YouTube.
Even without the plugins, the overwhelmingly negative reactions to the trailer are evident on the regular YouTube interface.
The number of likes is very low compared to the number of views. Currently, the video has 5.625 million views. However, it has only collected 67,000 likes, meaning about one like per 84 views. Compare that to the official trailer for the highest-grossing movie of 2026 thus far, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie that generated over $1 billion at the box office. Their official trailer has 10.1 million views and 296,000 likes, one like for about every 34 views.
All the top-rated comments under the trailer are negative as well. Most of them make fun of the controversial casting of Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o in the role of Helen of Troy.
Nyong’o’s role has been fuelling negative discussions online ever since rumours of it were reported back in February. Most people see it as the newest iteration of the ahistorical ‘raceswapping’ trend in mainstream media.
The Only Film Trailer with a Worse Like–Dislike Ratio than The Odyssey
With users sharing screenshots of the like–dislike ratio of the latest official trailer for The Odyssey, multiple entertainment outlets pointed out one thing: this is the second worst like–dislike ratio for a major production movie trailer in Hollywood history.
The only film with a proportionally more disliked trailer: Disney’s 2025 adaptation of Snow White, which ended up posting a nine-figure loss for its studio.
Does that mean that The Odyssey is heading for a catastrophic flop at the box office as well?
Not necessarily. Current industry projections put the film’s generated revenue on opening weekend at around $220 million globally. To continue with our comparison to Snow White, that is more than double what the Disney film brought in in its opening weekend, $87 million.
Despite the negative social media buzz around it, The Odyssey has performed extremely well in ticket pre-sales, even breaking the record for IMAX theatres with 150,000 tickets sold in 24 hours.
However, please also note that with a massive production budget of $250 million, the new Christopher Nolan film cannot afford any major drop-off in sales for subsequent weekends. Given that movie theatres keep about half the ticket sales revenue, and marketing costs are not included in the production budget, it needs to generate around $550–600 million just to break even.
Bad ‘word of mouth’ on social media certainly affects the scale of the near-inevitable drop in audiences following the premiere weekend. Thus, even with a respectable showing of around $200 million on its opening weekend, the movie’s profitability can still be in jeopardy.
However, a flop of the magnitude of Snow White—or more recently, Supergirl—is not in the cards for The Odyssey featuring a black Helen of Troy.
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