12
votes
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and the rise of the single issue filmgoer
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- Title
- Nolan's Odyssey: Why We Can't Talk About Movies Anymore
- Authors
- HoldMyDualshock
- Duration
- 24:01
- Published
- Jul 14 2026
I don’t find this very compelling. For one, it lumps together many things as “Hollywood” without defining what exactly the synecdoche is referring to, then proceeds to make sweeping generalizations without specific examples.
Also, the headline has the Odyssey in it, and the actual contents it’s essentially not mentioned at all, which is just clickbait.
The main thesis is that “Hollywood movies” are made with the idea that the movie is made as an element of support to some kind of movement and identity and banking on the support of that movement or identity.
The only thing I can think of that actually fits that is the Black Panther marvel movies, which, while not being a terrible movie, did advertise itself implicitly as a landmark for the African American community.
The video didn’t really have any elaborated examples, and at the end they threw in… supergirl? What single issue is that supposed to be about? Feminism? It’s not really that kind of movie, nor was it advertised as such.
They tried the same thing with Bros and the queer community. And then blamed straight people for its failure when they didn’t show up to “support” the movie.
Thats a fair critique, I guess this video doesnt do a very good job of rigorously proving its point, it only appealed to me because I already agreed with the concept going into it.
One thing I would push back on is that I dont think its saying that movies are necessarily being made as an element of support, rather this is an aspect of their media engagement strategy in advertising it.
I think this is another issue with the video, it tried to have its cake and eat it too by straddling the line on that.
Point A: fundamentally, I don't think anyone actually cares if the media engagement strategy tries to highlight how a particular movie aligns with a particular demographic. Like, who cares if actors on a media tour try to incorporate some social messaging in their interviews. That doesn't affect the intrinsic artistic vision of the movie.
Point b: people would take issue with movies being essentially vapid single-issue propaganda, that "lacks a universal human story", as the video puts it.
So, point A has actual evidence for its existence, but lacks any actual impact. Point B lacks any evidence for its existence, but has an actual impact. The video tries to muddle the water and associate point A's evidence with point B's impact.
I’ve gotten these guys on my YouTube feed, as part of the thousands of channels that make similar content. Their video on James Gunn was slightly more interesting, but I find their actual essays to be incoherent.
They also conflate the actual marketing of the film with the interviews that the actors give. Yes, that’s part of the marketing, but Lupita Nyongo giving cringe inducing answers to questions doesn’t mean that Universal Pictures is shaping the marketing of the film around that pop-feminist lens. Same with Milly Alcock saying the film is a female empowerment film, and Rachel Zegler saying that Snow White was a victim in the original film.
When a film’s marketing involves that messaging it’s in the actual marketing materials. People brought up Black Panther and Bros, and those are great examples because that’s exactly what those films did. Heres a discussion we had during the release of Bros..
The lead creative behind The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, who has been bombarded with questions of its casting, has called all of it nonsense. He said it doesn’t matter. If he was pushing a message then he would use those opportunities to push a message, like Paul Feig did with Ghostbusters (2016).
Barbie (2023) was a message film and they could have made the marketing for it exactly that type of Captain Marvel “her-o” stuff. But they didn’t. Their tagline was “if you love Barbie. If you hate Barbie. This is for you.” Which is part of trying to appeal to everyone that this essayist is saying doesn’t exist.
There’s just too few examples to back up this thesis.
I think the video goes too far in saying this is Hollywoods primary or only strategy, but they do have a point in my opinion that its more than an unforced error.
I dont think anyone was intending to set off a 2 year long hate campaign against Rachel Zeigler by a bunch of slop youtube channels when they made that one interview where she said "weird". But I do think there is an unspoken understanding between the actor, the interviewer, and the broader production that saying some provocative thing could generate a minor controversy which could elevate the films visibility. Which leads to occassions of actors walking into obvious pitfalls because it might end up working out in their favor.
Its more just a natural consequence of the incentives. Like how youtube's metric for "engagement" includes downvotes as well as upvotes, so lots of ragebait content rises to the top.
This isn’t true though. The idea that all publicity is good publicity is a myth, and very few people in Hollywood actually believe that.
Disney actually went on and blamed Zegler in the trades for Snow White bombing.
The reason so many of these things happen is not because it’s intentional on any level. It’s because media people want a story, and actors tend to be self-important and delusional. And because actors in general have a liberal bent, they say a lot of dumb stuff that they think makes them sound smart and progressive. The media doesn’t even try to ask inflammatory questions sometimes. The question Nyongo got was “what would you ask Homer?” And she went on about the screen time of the women and blah blah blah.
There are real examples of this. Ghostbusters (2016) was the kind of the prototype for this type of marketing. With the director and the cast saying the people that didn’t want to watch it hated women and whatnot.
Captain Marvel also did this, and while that was successful, Brie Larson’s career massively suffered.
Even with The Bride, which the film itself is trying to be a “single issue film.” Warner Bros tried really hard to hide that in their marketing. But they couldn’t control what Gyllenhaal was out there saying because she’s, again, self-important and delusional.
There’s just very little incentive to be doing any of this. We are far removed from the films that actually used this stuff to their advantage in the late 2010s.
I'll admit I never actually saw the Ghostbusters with the female cast, but I still think most of the backlash was that it starred women. Maybe it actually was that bad. But look at what came out around the same time:
A bad Robocop remake, a bad Ninja Turtles remake, a ton of bad Transformers remakes, a bad GI Joe remake and probably like 10 others I'm forgetting. Sure they were panned and clowned on, but none of them saw the level of absolute contempt that the movie with all the women did.
Undoubtably a lot of the backlash was sexist. But let's not pretend it was a good movie!
But that was a result of the marketing. This article is a decent rundown of what happened at the time.
Was some of it sexism. Sure. But from the first parts of the marketing it was clear that the film was taking on a different tone and had a different sense of humor to it. So if you didn’t like that, the sexism stuff ended up becoming a shield for the film. Something that the studio, the cast, and Paul Feig would use to say “it’s not a bad movie, you just hate women” which further turned people off.
It didn’t even do that bad at the box office, it just had an outrageous budget because Sony under Pascal was woefully mismanaged. But it could have done better if they had done a more fan servicey thing from the beginning.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife would come out five years later. And while its critical reception was worse, it was much better received by the fans. And that’s with a girl being the main character, and being “the chosen one” to carry the Ghostbusters name.