The Odyssey’s Press Tour Is Starting to Look Like Supergirl’s And The Dislike Counter Is Hitting Crazy Numbers
The Odyssey opens July 17. The official @odysseymovie account on X has turned off comments on recent promotional posts. The countdown trailer now sits at 428,000 dislikes against 60,000 likes on a Greek-language YouTube upload alone. The London premiere footage posted to X shows Zendaya in a white gown on the Thames, receiving 35,000 views and 865 likes, modest numbers for what is supposed to be one of the most anticipated films of the year.
With all of that backdrop, it’s hard to imagine things getting worse, but Lupita Nyong’o has started her press tour.
It’s already starting to look a lot like Supergirl. Milly Alcock spent three months giving interviews that progressively alienated the film’s natural audience. Each interview added a new controversy. The box office tracking declined in direct correlation. Supergirl opened to $37.1 million on a $170 million budget and will lose somewhere between $80 and $120 million. The press tour did not cause the casting problems, but it confirmed them repeatedly for an audience that was already skeptical, until the skeptics had no reason to consider giving the film a chance.
Nyong’o’s interview this week is the first signal that The Odyssey’s promotional campaign is following the same path.
“When you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, very little time is spent from the perspective of the women. It’s told from a very masculine side of things. The Odyssey takes a lot of time to really consider things from the female perspective. And so we see in Helen and Clytemnestra how this war has affected them both, and they respond to it very differently because of their experience.”
This is a $250 million adaptation of the foundational text of Western literature. The Odyssey is not a masculine epic in need of a corrective female perspective. It is the story of Odysseus trying to get home, told in part through Penelope’s perspective, a woman who runs a kingdom alone for twenty years, outmaneuvers scores of suitors through wit and deception, and whose intelligence matches her husband’s exactly. Clytemnestra’s arc in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is one of the most complex and morally terrifying female revenge narratives in the ancient world. Neither of these women needs to be rescued from Homer by a modern film production. The claim that the source material is “told from a very masculine side of things” and requires Nolan’s intervention to “really consider things from the female perspective” is revisionism dressed as empowerment.
Nyong’o also told CBR that Helen and Clytemnestra are “two women who are driven by their anger towards the world around them and the men who rule over them.” Nolan described his own casting decision to Time: “The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen. And Lupita makes it look effortless. I was absolutely desperate for her to do the part.”
Helen of Troy’s strength and poise. Not her appearance. Not the specific physical description Homer gives her. Not the cultural and mythological specificity of who she is within the world of the poem. Her strength and poise, which Nolan found in Nyong’o. When pressed on the backlash, Nyong’o said: “I can’t spend my time thinking about people who don’t love me” and “you can’t perform beauty.”
That last line is a tell. Nobody argued Nyong’o cannot perform beauty. The argument is about fidelity to the source material’s specific character, in the specific world Homer created, where Helen’s particular appearance is not incidental but causal — it is the thing the poem tells you launched a thousand ships. Dismissing that as “you can’t perform beauty” collapses a literary and historical argument into a personal attack on Nyong’o’s looks, which she then deflects. It is a framing device, not an answer.
The comment-disabling on X is the other data point worth noting. Universal left the YouTube comments open on the trailer, and the comment section became one of the most-shared pieces of organic content the film has generated. The social team behind @odysseymovie apparently reached a different conclusion about the replies to their promotional posts and shut them down. Studios disable comments when the replies are generating more negative attention than the posts themselves. That decision, combined with the dislike numbers, the press tour framing, and the tracking data, assembles into a picture the industry has seen before.
The Odyssey’s IMAX presales broke records a year in advance. Nolan’s audience is real and loyal. The tracking still projects an $80-100 million domestic opening. Those numbers reflect Nolan’s name on the poster, not the film’s specific content.
Supergirl’s presale data also looked reasonable until it didn’t. The press tour accelerated its collapse. Whether Nyong’o’s “masculine side of things” framing is the beginning of the same pattern or an isolated comment will be determined by what the next two weeks of promotional interviews produce.
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.
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