Update — July 10: The dislike counter has kept climbing, and Nolan finally breaks his silence as the count hits 700,000, waving off the backlash with “Comes with the territory.” The campaign’s answer has arrived: the cast is taking over The Tonight Show for four straight nights right before release, with Nolan himself booked for after opening weekend.
Robert Pattinson is now selling Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as Twilight. Not a critic making the joke. Not fans piling on the trailer. Pattinson himself, on the record, one week into a backlash that now has Universal’s trailer sitting at 651,000 dislikes.
Speaking with MTV UK (via Deadline), Pattinson described Antinous, the suitor he plays in Nolan’s film, by going straight back to the franchise that made him famous.
“I think they will be rooting for him. I keep comparing it — it’s kind of like Jacob in Twilight,” he said.
Then he described the plot.
“What The Odyssey is about — Penelope just can’t make her mind up between the two guys and I’m just trying to like help her make a decision. It’s like, ‘It’s fine. He’s dead, get over it,'” said Pattinson.
Homer Did Not Write A Love Triangle
Read Pattinson’s plot summary again. In Homer’s poem, one of the oldest surviving works in the Western canon, Penelope is not torn between anybody.
She spends twenty years holding off the suitors, famously unweaving a burial shroud every night to stall them, while Antinous, the most arrogant of the pack, becomes the first man Odysseus puts an arrow through when he finally walks back into his own hall.
There is no decision for Anne Hathaway’s Penelope to make. There is no version of the poem where the audience roots for Antinous. And there is definitely no ancient Greek version of Team Jacob waiting to be discovered here.
“She can’t make her mind up between the two guys” is not The Odyssey. It’s a love triangle. In other words, it is Twilight, and Pattinson is not wrong to make the comparison. He is saying out loud what the audience hammering this trailer by the hundreds of thousands has suspected from day one: Nolan’s Odyssey is not Homer’s.
The Press Tour Keeps Borrowing From Bigger Franchises
Pattinson’s Twilight comparison is not happening in a vacuum. It is now part of a pattern.
Nolan started it, comparing Samantha Morton’s single-scene turn to Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.
Then Hathaway, Penelope herself, spent a press stop on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Variety) retelling her Dark Knight Rises audition story: a full week spent developing “demonic Harley Quinn energy,” complete with “weird jester flats and a striped top,” before Nolan revealed two hours into the meeting that the part was Catwoman. “Transform!”
Batman. Batman again. Now Twilight.
The press tour for a reported $250 million adaptation of Homer is running on borrowed franchise heat, nine days from release.
The Dislike Counter Keeps Running
The Official Countdown Trailer went up on Universal’s YouTube channel seven days ago.
As of this writing, it sits at 6.1 million views, 71,000 likes, and 651,000 dislikes per the extensions that restore YouTube’s hidden counts. That is better than nine-to-one against, roughly 90 percent negative, on the studio’s own upload.
The arc has not bent since July 1, when we first reported the ratio at 55,000 dislikes: 450,000 by the weekend as Universal locked replies on X, past 600,000 within a day of the premiere, 651,000 now.
And the trailer is still sitting at #3 on YouTube’s movies trending chart with more than 34,000 comments. The audience is showing up. They’re just voting no.
It is the one number Universal cannot lock, curate, or reframe, and it keeps following the movie into every press stop.
Nine Days Until The Only Number That Matters
The first reactions out of the London premiere called the film a triumph, and the raves are real.
But the praise came from the room. The counter comes from the audience.
Nine days out, the campaign’s answer to 651,000 dislikes is Heath Ledger, Harley Quinn, and Jacob Black, selling the oldest story in Western literature with the franchise playbook.
The Odyssey opens July 17. That number won’t need an extension to read.
