UPDATE: The movie won the opening argument at the box office, but the pans found a bigger name. The Odyssey‘s own translator, Emily Wilson, has torched Nolan’s script in a viral review, writing she would be ashamed to have written any part of it.
Christopher Nolan has finally addressed the number chasing his movie, and the number kept moving while he talked.
The Official Countdown Trailer for The Odyssey has now made it 700,000 dislikes, the same week Nolan sat down with The Telegraph, lifted his cup of tea, and waved the whole thing off: “Comes with the territory.”
The director’s answer to the loudest audience revolt of the summer runs through, of all places, Batman.
Nolan Answers The Backlash
In the interview, Nolan was asked whether the reaction caught him off guard. It did not, and his reasoning is simple: nobody arguing about the film has seen it. Any conversation happening before release, he argued, cannot mean much, because the people having it do not yet know what the film actually is.
“Comes with the territory,â he says, with the interview noting Nolan grinned “serenely, before lifting his cup and saucer and taking a theatrical sip.”
Nolan continued, “But look, these conversations that happen before people see the film â theyâre always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet. But remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.”
He also said he knew from day one that The Odyssey was exactly the kind of project that would draw strong opinions, in good faith and in bad, about how the material should be handled.
His case for tuning all of it out is the decade he spent inside the Dark Knight trilogy, adapting a character that writers and artists had shaped for some 65 years, with expectations attached to every choice he made.
The lesson he took from those years is that a filmmaker cannot afford to worry about any of it, and that the job is to serve the source with the strongest personal interpretation he can bring.
âWhen I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents,” Nolan explained. “And what I learned over my time on that trilogy is you canât worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”
Nolan pointed to the early skepticism over his own big swings on that trilogy, including handing the Joker to Heath Ledger, then best known as a heartthrob, and putting him in smeared makeup.
The doubters, in his telling, came around because they could feel the sincerity of the attempt, even when it was not the version they would have made. He is betting Odyssey audiences land the same way once they are in the theater.
âAll I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. Itâs very different from how anyone else would do it, but thatâs what adaptation is,â he said.
The Batman Defense Is Now The Whole Campaign
If invoking Ledger sounds familiar, it should.
Nolan opened this press cycle by comparing Samantha Morton’s single scene to Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.
Anne Hathaway followed with her Dark Knight Rises audition story and its demonic Harley Quinn energy. Then Robert Pattinson pitched his suitor Antinous as Jacob from Twilight while the counter blew past 650,000.
Now the director himself, asked to answer the biggest audience rejection of his career, reaches for the same shield: remember when you doubted us on Batman.
The difference is what the doubt looks like. In 2006 it was message boards arguing over casting. In 2026 it is a live public tally on the studio’s own upload, and it reads 700,000.
The Counter Nolan Calls Irrelevant
The trailer dislikes haven’t settled since July 1, when we first reported the ratio at 55,000.
It hit 450,000 by the first weekend as Universal locked replies on X, blew past 600,000 a day after the premiere, sat at 651,000 as Pattinson made his Twilight pitch, and has now cleared 700,000.
Universal cannot moderate it, and the press tour cannot outrun it. The counter has followed this movie through the premiere, through the raves, and now into the director’s own sit-downs.
One Week To Change The Subject
Nolan does have the room on his side. The first reactions out of London called the film a triumph, with career-best notices across the cast, and the campaign’s final act is a big one: the cast takes over The Tonight Show for four straight nights starting Monday.
On July 17, the conversation Nolan calls irrelevant stops being pre-release. The audience has already cast 700,000 votes on what it thinks this film is. Nolan is betting the movie itself flips them the way Ledger did.
He has exactly one weekend to be right. For more, head on over to our guide on everything we know about The Odyssey.
