Christopher Nolan’s newest trailer for The Odyssey now has over 230,000 dislikes on YouTube — his most disliked trailer ever, by a mile. The rallying cry behind the ratio: “woke” casting of beloved characters, with Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen of Troy and Zendaya’s Athena catching the loudest fire, and Travis Scott’s bard not far behind.
”Woke” is doing too much work
Let’s be honest about both halves of this. Woke has been a real issue in Hollywood — that’s not imaginary, and pretending otherwise is why audiences stopped trusting studios. But the word is being over-abused, stretched to cover every casting choice somebody doesn’t like.
And I don’t believe for a second that Nolan went into The Odyssey thinking about how to be as “woke” as possible to appease a certain group of people. That’s just not how the man operates. Look at his own explanation for the Travis Scott casting: the Odyssey survived for centuries as oral poetry, which he called analogous to rap. Agree or disagree — that’s a director following his read of the material, not a focus group.
Him and HIS story
Nolan has always had an interesting way of telling stories, and he has never much cared about the opinion of others while doing it.
“It’s only him and HIS story. That has yet to fail him.”
That’s the track record talking. The guy made a three-hour biopic about a physicist into a billion-dollar phenomenon. The ratio on a trailer has never been the metric that decides whether a Nolan film works.
What it means next
Here’s the prediction, on the record: The Odyssey finishes as the third biggest film of the summer, behind Toy Story 5 and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
230,000 dislikes today. Box office receipts July 17. Let’s see which number matters.