Posted on 08/04/2026 5:14:48 AM PDT by Red Badger
Hollywood pulled out all the stops for “The Odyssey” – They relied heavily on director Christopher Nolan’s built-in and generally pretentious audience to drive early box office revenues.
The hype machine was running non-stop for months before the release. The distributor’s focused heavily on IMAX ticket sales, which cost more than double a normal theater ticket. They attempted to hide the woke content of the film from the public for as long as possible (an ancient Greek epic with no Greeks, featuring black, Asian, Hispanic and trans actors with a story that deconstructs the hero’s journey of Odysseus, making him into a broken shell of a man. Historical inaccuracies and modernization are rampant in the movie.
Critical websites also froze the audience ratings above 95% by rejecting most negative reviews.
Despite all of this, The Odyssey’s early box office was not impressive compared to most blockbuster movies. It didn’t even break the top 60 movies for opening weekend revenues (adjusted for inflation). The political left rushed onto social media to declare victory, claiming that “Get Woke, Go Broke is over”.
Then, Spider Man: Brand New Day opened and ate The Odyssey’s lunch, showing how a real blockbuster is supposed to perform.
For its opening weekend, Spider Man raked in $927 million worldwide – Compare that to The Odyssey’s $264 million global box office for the first weekend. Spider Man crushed The Odyssey without trying. Spider Man is projected to make around $2.5 billion in the next few weeks while Nolan’s movie is struggling to hit $1 billion. If Nolan had made a non-woke movie, maybe he would have had better numbers.
The Odyssey’s theater take sounds like a success, despite being easily surpassed by Spider Man. However, with all the bluster over the film’s “woke triumph”, leftists are avoiding an inconvenient truth: The Odyssey has yet to make a single penny in raw profit.
Nolan’s woke translation has brought in $911 million after three weeks, but it needs around $950 million just to break even. This is accounting for marketing costs, theaters taking their 50% cut, and Nolan taking his own 20% cut of revenues as part of his contract. Will the Odyssey break even? Probably, but Universal Studios will be straining to make any meaningful profit from the production.
Nolan will be laughing all the way to the bank, but distributors will not be as fortunate. Spider Man has already surpassed the break even point and made a profit.
In the end, The Odyssey will represent nothing more than a woke vanity project for a director who is fading in talent. Nolan says he may be taking several years away from the business after Odyssey, which means Hollywood expended all its ammunition on one last stand.
The Hollywood model has long been to force progressive content on audiences while ignoring public pleas for less propaganda. In the minds of the elites, the masses must be conditioned over time to accept wokeness. They believe that if they saturate the market for long enough, movie-goers will eventually capitulate and accept woke as the new normal. This has not happened.
Instead, nearly every woke movie and streaming series has failed, losing the industry billions in cumulative production costs. Studios have been forced in the past couple of years to return to less political messaging and more classic entertainment.
The Odyssey is a defiant rebellion, specifically designed as a vehicle to revitalize the Hollywood argument in favor of woke content. Yet, compared to non-woke movies, the profit margin is looking dismal.
The political left never learns, they only double down on failure and convince themselves that their own propaganda is reality. Even if one considers The Odyssey a “success” for making it’s money back, how many woke movies can Christopher Nolan possibly direct? One every few years? No other director has a similar simp audience to lean on.
Meaning, The Odyssey is likely the last gasp, the death rattle of far-left content gaining any momentum in theaters for years to come. One woke movie breaking even does not make up for hundreds of box office disasters.
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“The political left never learns, they only double down on failure and convince themselves that their own propaganda is reality.”
1984, George told us..................
Yes. The Odyssey has dropped off my screens with virtually no mentions or commentary for a week or so. The rabbit hole in action.
Even Fox was pushing that hot mess.
To the point of interviewing director Christopher Nolan in the middle of a world cup game just to claim the movie WASN’T woke.
me thinks thou doth protest too much
The Odyssey’s box office numbers PLUMMETED after all the showings that were sold out before the awful word of mouth.
Even if you take away all the controversal casting, the dialogue is still boring and clunky. They took all the beauty and nuance out of the poem.
Say what you will about Tom Cruise, his Top Gun: Maverick was a perfect example of what a summer blockbuster should be. The movie stayed away from politics and PC nonsense and just told a good, solid, exciting story. What’s not to like? Hollywood just can’t seem to get out of their own way.
Let’s not pretend the new Spider-Man isn’t woke as well.
Ironically, most reviews cite Tom Holland - the star of this Spiderman film - as the worst actor in "The Odyssey."
The problem was that he seemed to be acting in a Marvel movie when everyone else was in a drama. I'm sure he's fine as Spider-Man.
Childish article that admits Nolan is making a fortune, while spinning on and on that Spiderman is now earning more.
So long as conservatives listen to what they want to hear rather than reality, they seem continue to be dumbed down.
I haven’t seen the movie, but it was a financial and critical hit. Admittedly most critics are leftists, but this is still reality.
Criticize the movie again, fine. Pretend that Spiderman beating it means something for conservatives? Nonsense.
Haven’t seen Spiderman yet but it’s loaded with woke actors.
I’m sick of Zendaya and Tom Holland, but they are a pop culture phenom.
Further stupidity of this article is that the two movies feature the same actors, and they gave Spiderman an annoying feminist Hispanic girlfriend. Flat chested too btw.
The Odyssey made more than 900 million dollars worldwide in less than 3 weeks.
Her mother is German and her father Nigerian. how do you get Hispanic from that? As to the rest, well, just speaks to your attitudes towards women in general.
it was a Nolan film, he has a near cult following, the presales alone were enormous.
The drop off says much more than the initial sales. No one is going to see it via word of mouth, once it was a known film people have decided it is not worth seeing.
That and the break even box office keeps moving from first $500-600M to now almost a billion dollars. You don’t get to $1B in earnings on presales and bad reviews.
And still didn't break even.
It’s made $700 million since opening. Generally, the reviews both commercial and from audience has been great. We can keep telling ourselves what we want to believe but reality doesn’t seem to support it.
MJ is supposed to be a red head, but they made her hispanic and made the red head the villain. Hollwood is destroying itself.
It's like The Music Man; as long as the checks clear for the instruments, what the music sounds like is not important.
Or like an NFP / NGO that pays out huge salaries but makes the problem worse; like for the primary purpose, not the PR purpose.
We went to see Spidey yesterday.
It was OK. Typical Marvel shlock.
My grandson (5 year old) loves Spider-Man. I was thinking we could take him some afternoon. But nope. Too much graphic violence (not “cartoony”) and subject matter for a little kid.
There was one scene where Spidey was going up against a bunch Han sword swingers. Spidey said, “Wow, that’s so cool.”
The Chinese fellating was tiring.
If this beat the Odessey, then that movie must be bad.
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