Christopher Nolan has spent twenty-five years as one of the only directors whose name alone could shut down online arguments. That run looks like it just ended.
The countdown trailer for ‘The Odyssey‘, Universal’s $250 million mythological epic starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, has turned into the most disliked trailer of Nolan’s career, and by some counts, one of the most disliked studio trailers in the last two years.
‘The Odyssey’ Trailer Dislike Ratio
Third-party estimates taken from the main Universal Pictures upload put the countdown trailer at around 51,000 likes against 255,000 dislikes, which works out to roughly 83% negative. Other trackers, checking at different points, found similar numbers. Return YouTube Dislike data showed the trailer sitting near 233,000 dislikes versus 50,000 likes, while another report using browser-extension estimates put it closer to 80% negative overall. The reaction was even worse internationally, with the Universal Pictures Canada upload showing about 1,200 likes to 17,000 dislikes.
For comparison, every Nolan trailer released in the past fifteen years had landed somewhere between 98 and 100% positive. So this drop in goodwill is unusually sharp for a director with his reputation.
‘The Odyssey’ Casting Controversy Fuels Months of Backlash
The backlash started building months before this final trailer even came out. Casting has been the main issue the whole time. Lupita Nyong’o is playing both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. Elliot Page’s role has sparked speculation and confusion. Travis Scott’s casting as a Homeric bard drew special criticism after Nolan compared the oral tradition of Homer’s epic to rap in an interview.
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People have also pointed to the trailer’s modern American accents and casual-sounding dialogue as things that clash with what audiences expected from a classical, mythological story. Universal has since dropped the usual pre-release influencer screenings, choosing instead to let only professional critics see the film before it opens on July 17.
Will Trailer Dislikes Affect ‘The Odyssey’ Box Office Numbers?
Even with all that, people in the industry warn against treating these numbers as a box-office prediction. Advance IMAX ticket sales reportedly broke records more than a year out, and early tracking has the film opening domestically somewhere between $80 and $100 million, which would put it ahead of where Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer‘ was at the same point.
Comparing Hollywood’s Biggest Trailer Backlashes
As bad as these numbers look, ‘The Odyssey‘ hasn’t reached the level set by Disney’s 2025 live-action ‘Snow White‘, starring Rachel Zegler, which is still the go-to example of a trailer getting completely rejected by its audience.
One tracking breakdown found Snow White‘s trailer hit a 96.29% dislike ratio. Other snapshots taken at different points in the campaign showed similarly lopsided results. One estimate found around 1.4 million dislikes against 100,000 likes, or about 93% negative, and a later trailer from the same campaign picked up over 1 million dislikes against roughly 40,000 likes. That backlash mostly came from controversy over Zegler’s public comments about the original 1937 film and her political statements during the press tour, along with criticism of the film’s CGI-heavy dwarf characters. ‘Snow White’ went on to badly underperform at the global box office.
By comparison, The Odyssey‘s roughly 80% dislike share, while extreme for a Nolan movie, is still nowhere near Snow White‘s near-total rejection.Whether this pattern means anything is still unclear. Trailer dislikes have predicted real box-office trouble before, but they’ve also failed to mean much in cases where a director’s fanbase shows up no matter what people say online. With ‘The Odyssey‘ releasing on July 17, we’ll find out within weeks whether the loudest online reaction of Nolan’s career actually affects ticket sales, or whether it just turns out to be noise.
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