Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
There’s a short list of Hollywood directors who can turn practically anything into a massive global hit: Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, James Cameron. But Christopher Nolan is in a class by himself. Of the eight movies he’s released since 2008, only one has failed to clear half a billion dollars at the box office, and even Tenet still managed to gross more than $300 million in the middle of a pandemic. He turned a three-hour biopic about a nuclear physicist into a nearly billion-dollar smash, and with The Odyssey notching Nolan’s biggest opening weekend yet, with $264 million worldwide, it’s already well on its way to depositing another billion in the bank.
While Cameron and the Russo brothers (who have directed several of Marvel’s biggest hits) might edge out Nolan on sheer numbers, Nolan’s box-office run is more impressive in terms of frequency and variety: The Russos have avoided having flops on their record only by banishing their three worst movies to streaming, and Cameron has released just four movies in the past 30 years. But Nolan has never gone more than three years between films, and although there’s no discounting the role the Dark Knight trilogy played in establishing him as a global superstar, he’s built his career largely without relying on franchise IP. His past 20 years might be the most spectacular box-office run in recent movie history. Not even Spielberg has a streak of blockbuster hits this long.
In other words: Only a fool would bet against Christopher Nolan. But the internet is full of fools. For months, credulous media outlets have been running with stories about the purported backlash to Nolan’s Odyssey, relying primarily and often exclusively on content sourced from Elon Musk’s X. If you opened the app anytime this summer, either on purpose or by muscle memory of happier times, you were greeted with a constant barrage of complaints about Nolan’s “woke” revisionism, much of it openly affirmed by the site’s owner. When a user named Homer Pavlos pointed to what he said were hundreds of thousands of downvotes on one of the movie’s trailers as proof of its imminent failure, Musk chimed in to opine that Nolan had “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke requirements for an Oscar.” When historian Tom Holland (i.e., not the one who plays Odysseus’ son) praised the movie as “amazing,” Musk responded by calling the popular Rest Is History host “such a cuck.”
Given that Musk is now his own social network’s biggest user, the mere fact of his participation acts as an enormous magnifying glass, and he’s been open about tweaking the site’s algorithm to boost what he characterizes as anti-woke points of view. Homer Pavlos has about 50,000 followers, but the tweet that Musk replied to now has nearly 4 million views. Up until opening day, my algorithm was still feeding me a steady stream of Odyssey criticism, much of it openly racist, and premised on the idea that Hollywood’s golden boy was about to get his comeuppance.
When I open X now, though, most of what I see is people talking about The Odyssey—not trolls or engagement farmers but regular people who are blown away by what they saw. CinemaScore, which surveys audience satisfaction, gave the film an A, and Rotten Tomatoes’ verified audience rating—limited to those who actually purchase tickets—is at 97 percent. There are reasoned criticisms, on X and elsewhere: that Nolan’s presentist take loses what makes Homer’s epic valuable as a historical document, that the guy still can’t write female characters to save his life. But the chud chatter seems to have died down noticeably. In its place, my feed is dominated by expressions of awe, people staggered by the scope and scale of Nolan’s old-school pageantry—he makes $250 million movies that actually look like $250 million—along with a hefty dose of FOMO from those still struggling to get tickets. Demand is so great that it’s been overheating projectors and crashing ticketing software—when I went to see the film on Friday afternoon, theater staff was writing down confirmation numbers with a pencil.
If The Odyssey’s critics haven’t quieted down, Musk’s app has at least given up on putting their opinions in front of my eyeballs. And although Musk hasn’t abandoned his crusade, his sole reaction to the movie’s massive opening and near-universal acclaim has been a cry-laugh emoji. Meanwhile, Ben Shapiro devoted 18 minutes to praising the film, calling Nolan “the best director working today” and dismissing criticisms that casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy was historically inaccurate. (He did sneak in a little transphobic jab at Elliot Page, as a treat.)
If there’s a backlash to The Odyssey—and I’ll allow that at least some of the social media malcontents may believe what they say—it’s too small to have any noticeable effect on what is sure to be one of the year’s biggest releases, not to mention the instant Oscar front-runner. (There are, of course, many months left in the year, and a director hasn’t won two Best Pictures so close together since the 1970s.) Perhaps the “anti-woke” critics always knew they would lose, and were merely trying to draft off Christopher Nolan’s momentum. (Some of them, no doubt, have already reaped the rewards of Musk’s algorithm.) But it’s hard to envision a more reliable recipe for failure than staking your claim to cultural relevancy on diminishing Christopher Nolan’s box-office haul. Musk and his minions lost the war. All that’s left is for them to go home.