Why 'The Odyssey' Discourse Is Not Over Yet

The film's second and third weekends in IMAX theaters matter more than the opening

This is actually painful for me to look at because it looks like plastic. Forget your anachronisms, I don’t care that it isn’t made out of boar’s tusks. Just don’t show me a helmet that looks like a 3D printer creation in your movie poster and expect me to pay the opportunity cost and ticket price of an IMAX film. Not happening

The Odyssey needs a solid second weekend to stay on course for the billion-dollar destination that Hollywood believes it deserves, right now. Director Christopher Nolan may not be the hero they needed, though.

The dismal economics of cinema mean that a film which grosses $303 million globally — raking in $163.6 million in domestic receipts and $140.2 million from overseas markets — reduces to about $140 million in net profit.

The Odyssey had a good opening weekend, but it must keep having good weekends (‘legs’) to reach profitability. It cost a reported $250 million to produce. Universal Pictures spent an estimated $125 million on marketing. Nolan has a reported $100 million payday coming out of gross receipts.

Movies do not really make money until they double their combined production and marketing budgets by taking a portion of each ticket. It is not an exaggeration to say that The Odyssey must actually make a billion dollars this way to be profitable. The journey is hardly over.

Getting to an actual billion will be more arduous than fans of the film expect. Dangers lie ahead in the form of collapsing box office returns, mixed word-of-mouth, and the limits of cinephile interest.

Nolan has his fans — millions of them — and some of them will see it twice. Many will buy one IMAX ticket and see it once, however. To have ‘legs’, the movie probably needed to be better than it reportedly is. It needs to keep them coming back, and keep new people coming in. That is the drama, now.

I have not seen the film. I do not intend to see it in an IMAX theatre. A film should not be judged on its technical stunts or its stunt casting. Outlets rejoicing that ‘woke’ has made a comeback are balanced by conservatives claiming the film is secretly subversive of western decline.

Rather than a consensus, the first weekend produced a cacophony of opinions that broke political boundaries. Politics are the least interesting aspect of a work of art, however.

When creators make politics their script, the film becomes boring and pedantic. Characters cease making sense and start defying expectations instead. This is the essence of ‘woke’ storytelling, and Nolan does not do that kind of storytelling.

In 2023, I said that Greta Gerwig’s failures as a political philosopher were her triumphs as a director, and the same is likely true of Nolan, based on descriptions of the film.

“Barbenheimer”, the cinematic two-punch phenomenon of Gerwig’s Barbie and Nolan’s Oppenheimer, demonstrated the mass appeal of films that are entertaining despite their deconstructions.

The criticisms of The Odyssey that intrigue me are not about the race of any actress. Elliot Page has been described as an uncanny valley that takes people out of the story, so I am prepared for this hiccup.

A more interesting point is how the casting, which is sure to win an Oscar, resembles the Los Angeles culture that has reproduced itself onscreen in other ways that utterly transform the narrative.

Matt Damon apparently plays Ulysses as a victim of PTSD on Calypso’s couch, with Charlize Theron as his chemical therapist. It is a curse of our time that diagnosis has become identity.

Christopher Nolan’s use of history and realism is selective. He eschewed an orchestra because those did not exist in the Bronze Age, but used a Viking longboat to shoot the scenes at sea instead of a characteristically Greek vessel of the period.

Laestrygonians appear in steel plate armor from the Renaissance. Myceneans wear helmets and armor from the wrong period of Greek history. Nolan is an auteur; he does what he wants with history, archaeology, and myth like a child combining toys from a dozen different brands in their play.

All the resources for this film went into casting and shooting. The raw IMAX film stock alone accounts for approximately $3 million of the total budget for The Odyssey. Nolan used over 2 million feet (roughly 379 miles) of physical 70mm IMAX negative, making history with the first feature film ever shot entirely in the format.

He used a $500,000 custom-built “Keighley” IMAX camera with an acoustic enclosure to shoot the film in three-minute clips. Anyone who has ever worked on a movie set will appreciate how excruciating that is.

Like many Americans, I will not be seeing this film in Nolan’s intended format because it is 30-50 percent more expensive than a ticket to see a regular feature film. We have been conditioned to wait for streaming, now. Many of us will wait.

In the meantime, the higher ticket price of IMAX seats means that fewer people are actually buying tickets to see Nolan’s Odyssey than it seems.

“Assuming the average ticket sold was an IMAX ticket at approximately $25, that translates to roughly 4.98 million admissions”, WDW Pro explains.

“If those same 4.98 million moviegoers had instead purchased standard-format tickets averaging $16.67 each, the domestic opening weekend would have generated approximately $83.0 million rather than $124.5 million.”

Toy Story 5 sold more actual tickets than The Odyssey in its opening weekend. An argument already exists for box office results to be reported in tickets sold rather than gross receipts, and The Odyssey has intensified those calls for reform.

Social media is abuzz with charges that Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, which it owns, are falsely showing app users packed theatres and selective reviews. Studio intolerance of fair use by YouTube creators has been complete, dinging them for copyright claims on every clip.

Despite intense online image curation by the studio, the overall audience impression has been mixed, to say the least. Many enjoy it, including Ben Shapiro, who is allowed to have a fun time watching a movie.

Others were unimpressed, and they are allowed their criticisms. The point, again, is that Nolan has not united the audience behind his film. He has rather divided a middling mass audience that paid premium ticket prices in the first weekend.

Americans did not ask to see a foundational hero of the western canon reduced to a trauma patient. My impression is that Nolan’s choice to have his diversity cast speak in modern accents immerses the viewer in his own world rather than ancient Greece.

His controversial decisions to remove the gods from the story and strip out the hero’s journey either do, or do not, balance the spectacle, according to the individual moviegoer. That is not a cultural watershed by any definition. It is a debate.

Nolan cannot even unite the ‘woke’ behind his film. Postmodernists are put off by his post-postmodernism. He reportedly followed the controversial translation of Emily Wilson in developing his script. Watson however has criticized Nolan for his focus on the “shame” of Odysseus over his “glory.”

“The film certainly presents us with an Odysseus who feels very bad about certain things he’s done in war and is struggling to process them in a very modern psychiatrized way,” Wilson said.

“He’s struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so. And he seems to feel bad about being a warrior and we never get to see him doing much warrioring.” She did not like the film.

Everyone has something they dislike. Indeed, the single most disappointing glimpse I have seen is a two-second clip of Matt Damon shooting his great bow, the one that only Ulysses is strong and wily enough to draw, with all the vigor and enthusiasm of dad plinking his kids with Nerf darts in the backyard for the hundredth time today.

Poor stage combat direction is of a piece with critiques of the visuals. Christopher Nolan is notoriously awful at sound direction, too. Several commentators have complained that much of the dialogue is lost in the mixing.

There are many reasons why someone who is woke might not like the film, and just as many reasons why someone who loathes wokeness might like it, and plenty of reactions in between.

My overall impression of the discourse around this film is that by the time the next IMAX release hits in mid-August, the film’s legs might not be long enough to put the budget in the black.

Then Dune III is likely to have a huge IMAX opening in December, just in time for Academy Awards season. Comparisons are inevitable, so the discourse around The Odyssey is hardly finished.

Elon Musk apparently wants to give Mel Gibson $100 million to make a more faithful adaptation of Homer. Musk also says that Grok generative AI will be able to create an alternative adaptation.

The debate over Nolan’s film promises to be a long, adventurous, arduous, and eventful journey filled with significant hardships and changes in perspective: an odyssey in itself. Fill your ears with wax or else tie yourself to the mast, for we are all destined to sail past the sirens of culture war for a while, yet.