The Odyssey's Incredible Box Office Success Challenges the "Go Woke, Go Broke" Notion | Vanity Fair

Sing, muse, of the cunning Christopher Nolan, who has once again achieved the impossible. His new adaptation of The Odyssey has earned rapturous reviews, a coveted “A” CinemaScore from audiences, and the best non-Batman-related opening of Nolan’s career. As of Sunday afternoon, it had taken in early $125 million domestically and over $139 million from international markets, per CNBC. That means the film has earned back its reported $250 million production budget without breaking a sweat, and is on track for its box office to reach Olympus-high heights.

Only a cyclops living in a cave could possibly be surprised by this news. Nolan’s been on a hot streak for the past two decades. His last film, a three-hour biopic about a communist-sympathizing physicist losing his security clearance, made nearly $1 billion. The Odyssey—a starry, action-packed, modern spin on one of western civilization’s oldest stories—is both more accessible and more inherently commercial than Oppenheimer was. It would be shocking if Nolan’s latest work didn’t earn even more money than that best picture winner did.

That said, there are two notable takeaways from The Odyssey’s dominance. One: Nolan doesn’t need a Barbenheimer-style grassroots phenomenon to sell tickets. And two: Social media noise is not real life.

Perhaps a handful of trolls—a small group that includes the richest man in the world—has sworn off Nolan’s film because its cast has the audacity to feature both a Black woman and a trans man. But loud as their voices may be, the actual grosses prove that they couldn’t dampen The Odyssey’s prospects. One could take this outcome as evidence that the right-wing campaign against the film actually helped it by turning the film into a liberal cause célèbre, if one were interested in being wrong. The real truth is that normal people, regular folks whose brains haven’t been pickled by constant exposure to the worst opinions on the internet, are unaware of this manufactured controversy. And even if they have heard about it, they certainly aren’t letting it influence their viewing habits.

In a just world, one governed by logic and reason—by Zeus’s law!—The Odyssey’s success would also put to bed an old conservative bugbear: the notion that Hollywood movies bomb when they’re overly influenced by the politics and qualities this cohort defines as “woke,” a concept so broad as to be essentially meaningless. This idea, rendered later as a pithy catchphrase—”go woke, go broke”—dates back roughly to the intense, misogynistic backlash to Paul Feig’s all-female 2016 Ghostbusters reboot. A wave that, in retrospect, feels like a harbinger for where that year’s presidential election was heading.

Ghostbusters was indeed a financial disappointment; the movie lost millions of dollars, killing a potential franchise in its cradle. But Ghostbusters didn’t fail because it was “woke.” It failed because it was a bad movie, an only fitfully funny action comedy that couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be or say.

Even so, it’s possible to draw a direct line from Ghostbusters to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a similar lightning rod released the following year. While lots of people loved the movie, a vocal contingent of self-identified Star Wars fans absolutely despised its inclusivity and its story choices. One of The Last Jedi's stars, Kelly Marie Tran, was plagued by racist harassment so vitriolic that she quit social media; more than 116,000 losers signed a petition pleading for Disney to “strike” the film “from the official canon.” And though The Last Jedi was the highest grossing film of 2017, in this case, it seems the folks who hated it actually may have had their voices heard. The next Star Wars film, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, landed like “a desperate scramble to win back fans’ affection,” as Vanity Fair wrote at the time: it sidelined Tran’s character, walked back plot developments from The Last Jedi, and generally felt “cobbled together from notes stuffed in the suggestion boxes of Reddit and Twitter.”

Perhaps that result emboldened the complainers, leading them to believe in their own power to sink a big studio production. And subsequent years would in fact be dotted by allegedly “woke” films that underperformed, like Disney’s 2023 remake of The Little Mermaid and the 2025 Pixar bomb Elio. Yet a 2025 study of “woke-adjacent” content in cinema, whatever that means, failed to find a definitive link between progressive themes and box office performance. And if you look back at the “woke” movies that have flopped, you’ll find the only thing that really unites these projects is their quality. The Little Mermaid was flat and perfunctory; Elio probably would have been better if it’d been more woke. Meanwhile, recent box office history is studded with overtly progressive, identity-focused films that have positively minted money, from Black Panther to Barbie to Wicked. The difference? Those movies were good.

And so, of course, is The Odyssey. But don’t take my word for it. The film is “grand spectacle with a fascinating moral core. It’s extraordinary,” writes one well-known cinephile named Ben Shapiro. Verified X users with names like Roman Helmet Guy can cry all they want about how “the positive reviews (by professional movie critics) are evidence of a woke conspiracy to overthrow Western civilization.” The rest of us will be too busy enjoying ourselves in IMAX 70mm to notice.

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