UPDATE: The lopsided response only intensified, with dislikes climbing past 600,000 even after positive first reactions landed. The casting backlash has now spread beyond social media to the Greek press, with Le Monde dispatching its Athens correspondent on the Helen of Troy controversy days before the London premiere.
Universal released the official countdown trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ahead of its July 17 opening, and the audience response is one-sided in the wrong direction.
Update â July 6: The trailer dislikes have passed 500K on the day of the world premiere.
Update â July 5: The trailer dislikes are nearly at 450K, with over 23K comments, and Universal has turned off comments on X following the London premiere.
Update â July 4: The trailer dislikes have hit over 350K, and there are now close to 20K comments.
Update â July 3: The countdown trailer backlash has exploded to 350,000 dislikes, and the fan blame game has already begun, with industry tracking attributing the reaction to rating bombing campaigns two weeks before the film even opens.
Update Friday 1:50pm EST: Since the publish time, the dislikes have risen to 258K, with over 83% negative. That officially makes this the most disliked trailer of Christopher Nolan’s career, and it’s not close â we broke down how it stacks up against every Nolan trailer ever, including Oppenheimer‘s 99% positive.
Previously:
The trailer sits at roughly 55,000 dislikes against 33,000 likes on the Universal Pictures YouTube channel, according to third-party extensions that restore YouTube’s hidden dislike counts.
That works out to about 62 percent negative. For a Nolan trailer on the studio’s own channel, weeks before release, that’s not noise. That’s a ratio.
The Odyssey Casting Backlash Hasn’t Faded
Zendaya as the goddess Athena. Lupita Nyong’o playing both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. Elliot Page, whose long-mystery role was reportedly revealed as Sinon after months of Achilles speculation.
The casting has drawn criticism from multiple directions, including Greeks calling out the production over representation, with the debate over the heritage of Nolan’s entire cast becoming a running story of its own.
Nyong’o has been a lightning rod in particular, with her Woman King exit resurfacing amid the backlash, her old Black Panther comments getting dredged back up, and even Elon Musk weighing in on her Helen of Troy casting.
The Pattern Universal Can’t Ignore
What makes the dislike ratio matter is that it’s not an isolated data point. It’s the latest in a pattern we’ve been tracking for weeks.
The presale frenzy was real, but broad audience interest never moved with it.
Tracking then showed interest actively plummeting as the casting controversy dragged on.
Universal skipped the usual influencer screening circuit entirely. And the first official tracking came in at $80 million to $100 million, a range wide enough to cover both a triumph and a disappointment on a reported $250 million budget.
What It Means for The Odyssey Box Office
A ratio’d trailer doesn’t sink a movie. Plenty of films have eaten dislikes and opened fine, and Nolan’s locked-in base already bought its IMAX 70mm seats a year ago.
But the studio playbook here has been to wait the controversy out, and with just over two weeks until release, the countdown trailer was the moment to show the noise had faded.
Instead, the audience showed up to say it hadn’t.
For everything confirmed and still rumored about the film, see our full guide to Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Watch the trailer:
