UPDATE: From 500K on premiere day, the tally has climbed to 700,000 with Nolan finally weighing in, calling the backlash something that “comes with the territory.” The pile-on kept climbing, with the counter surging past 611,000 dislikes even as the first reactions landed, calling the film a triumph. Meanwhile, Nyong’o’s new junket comments about Homer are fueling the backlash further. Nolan also dropped the Heath Ledger Dark Knight card.
The Odyssey’s countdown trailer has passed half a million dislikes, and it picked the day of the film’s world premiere to do it.
The trailer now sits above 500,000 dislikes against roughly 60,000 likes on the Universal Pictures YouTube channel, per extensions that restore the hidden counts.
That’s a reaction running nearly 90 percent negative, on the studio’s own channel, on the day Nolan and the cast walk the carpet in London.
Five Days From 55K to Half a Million
The speed is the story.
When we first reported the ratio on July 1, the trailer had 55,000 dislikes. By July 3 it was 350,000, with the industry already blaming rating bombing.
Over the weekend, it pushed toward 450,000 as Universal locked the replies on its premiere photos. This morning it was 490,000. Now the counter has crossed 500,000, a ninefold explosion in five days that shows no sign of leveling off.
Along the way the casting backlash went international and Elon Musk called Nolan “a worm” to an audience of hundreds of thousands. The trailer’s comment section remains the one venue Universal can’t curate, and the audience knows it.
The Number the Premiere Has to Answer
The first social reactions out of the premiere window are due within hours, and they now arrive with a half-million-dislike counter running in the background.
If the reactions are rapturous, the question becomes whether praise for the film can outrun rejection of the campaign. If they’re mixed, the verdict becomes the counter.
Either way, the milestone lands at the worst possible moment for a studio that has spent the week locking doors, and eleven days before the $80 million to $100 million tracking gets tested for real.
For everything confirmed and still rumored about the film, see our full guide to Nolan’s The Odyssey.
