The Odyssey Has 233,000 Dislikes on YouTube, And Universal Banned Influencers From Seeing It

Universal Pictures released the final countdown trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on July 1. As of this morning, the estimated dislike count via Return YouTube Dislike sits at 233,000 against 50,000 likes — a ratio approaching 5-to-1. The trailer has over 1 million views. Universal left the comments open. They should not have done that, and they should not stop.

The comments section is doing the work the trailer cannot.

@Tadria70, 8,700 likes: “The face that emptied a thousand seats.”

@andrewtroy810, 13,000 likes: “The Odyssey: Downtown LA edition.”

@CounterAttack-v7d, 10,000 likes: “The face that launched a thousand ‘huh?’s”

@jiminycriket, 6,100 likes: “The face that launched a thousand ‘SHHHHEEEEEIITS...’”

@ThePlaytriarchy, 2,600 likes: “Look at me, I’m the Helen now.”

@devin_the_dude_3, 3,300 likes: “No Greeks were harmed or hired for this Greek tale.”

@costilla1212, 11,000 likes: “I’m surprised they forgot the rap music.”

@MicukoFelton, 831 likes: “Hollywood owes Greece an apology.”

@Abbenhammer: “If they played this on a plane I would still walk out.”

@GigaCrafty, 943 likes: “Shout out to Universal for leaving the comments on.”

It’s true Universal, to their credit, left the comments on. Every other studio in this situation hits the restrict button before the ratio can spread across social media. Universal did not. Whether that is confidence or indifference is the open question.

The controversy surrounding the film has been building for months and involves multiple distinct complaints that critics have repeatedly tried to collapse into a single racism accusation. They are not the same complaint.

Lupita Nyong’o is confirmed to play Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. Homer describes Helen in physical terms that are explicit in the original Greek — leukōlenos, white-armed, the most beautiful woman in the world by the standards of the Mediterranean civilization that produced the poem. The casting is not an abstract debate about representation. It is a specific claim about a specific character whose physical attributes are written into the text. Nyong’o won an Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave. Her talent is not the argument. The argument is about the material.

Zendaya plays Athena. The “Zendaya fatigue” complaint is the most defensible criticism the film’s defenders can point at — it is about marketing saturation, not ideology. She has been in everything for three years. Casting her as a central goddess of Greek mythology in a 250 million dollar epic adds to the sense that the film is making choices about who gets to inhabit this world that owe more to the current moment than to Homer.

Elliot Page’s role was kept secret for months, generating speculation that it was Achilles. It is now confirmed as Sinon — the Greek soldier who deceived the Trojans into accepting the wooden horse inside Troy. Sinon is a trickster and a liar who convinces an entire city to destroy itself on false pretenses. Whatever Nolan intended, the casting of a transgender actor as the man who tricks an entire civilization through deception is a choice that will not go unanalyzed.

Travis Scott plays a bard. Nolan has described the choice as reflecting the oral poetry tradition of the epic, drawing an analogy to rap. The analogy is not wrong academically. It does not make Travis Scott a bard. @costilla1212 already said it with 11,000 likes.

The Greek government's criticism is distinct from all of the above. The production accepted significant subsidies from the Greek government and filmed on location in Greece while casting no major Greek actors in principal roles. The Greek City Times published an open letter. Greek officials raised the issue publicly. A people whose mythology, language, and culture this film is built on were effectively used as scenery. Elon Musk weighed in on the casting choices on X, noting that Nolan “wants the awards” — suggesting the director’s choices were shaped by Oscar eligibility considerations. Nyong’o dismissed the criticism in Elle magazine without addressing the specifics.

Universal announced June 25 that it is skipping influencer screenings entirely. After the film’s global premiere in London on July 6, advance showings go only to professional critics. Influencers and fan-site bloggers who normally receive early screenings in exchange for enthusiastic pre-release social content are out.

The mainstream press has framed this as a show of confidence. Mario Nawfal, on X, read it differently: “Hollywood is cooked and they finally know it. The Odyssey trailer is sitting at massive dislikes and counting, already Nolan’s most hated trailer ever. Now Universal is skipping influencer screenings because they’re terrified the real reaction leaks before they can control the narrative. Yes, the ones who told you Rings of Power was actually good can’t tank this BS. The ‘it’s just mythology’ cope is hilarious when the whole point was to shove a message in people’s faces. Legacy media is still silent like usual, but normal people aren’t playing along anymore. Brother, when the access media is the ones they’re now too scared to invite to screenings, you know it’s going to be a horror show.”

Dark Horizons noted the context that the mainstream press mostly skipped: gushing influencer praise for both Disclosure Day and Supergirl ahead of more mixed professional reviews had recently eroded audience trust in the entire system. Universal’s decision to bypass influencers reads differently once you know that the previous two major releases that used them both underperformed. The studio may simply be cutting the cord on a marketing tool that no longer converts.

The tracking data is the fact the dislike ratio cannot change. The Odyssey is projecting an $80-100 million domestic opening. IMAX pre-sales broke records a year in advance. The people buying those tickets are Nolan’s core audience, a demographic that has shown up for him through every film from Memento to Oppenheimer. They will show up July 17 regardless of the comments section. The dislike ratio and the pre-sale data are two separate audiences making two different statements simultaneously. One is voting with clicks. One is voting with credit cards.

What Universal is banking on is that the second group is bigger. They may be right. They may also be about to find out whether Nolan’s audience will forgive creative choices they rejected before they saw the film.

Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: Nolan’s Odyssey Is Tracking $80-100M, But Don’t Confuse the Numbers With the Film Quality