MAGA America Now Needs Conspiracy Theories to Explain How The Odyssey Could Possibly be a Box Office Hit

A key part of existence as a highly online right-wing chud is to constantly forget that you live in an extremely carefully constructed echo chamber that allows no outside discourse (or normal behavior) of any kind to penetrate the bubble. To really buy in to this sort of MAGA culture warrior identity, you have to convince yourself that your Twitter feed is not only free from 90% bots, but that the conversations happening there are a microcosm of the same conversations happening in real world spaces, between people who have seen the sun within the last decade or known the amorous touch of another human being. Only once you surrender to that current of delusion can you react with the necessary shock and outrage to the idea that a blockbuster mythological action film from Christopher Nolan, a man who has already made multiple $1 billion features, is somehow … also a success at the box office? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE, you will no doubt ask yourself? What dark forces are at work behind the scenes, to make a film from the director of The Dark Knight, Interstellar and Inception a success?

Thankfully, the MAGA influencer network has been hard at work digging up the terrible truth: The entire world is engaging in coordinated fakery designed to project the success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey! It’s all part of a heinous plot to undermine classical western (white) values and the dignity of an ancient Greek story that has already been adapted roughly 1,000 times previously, including a beloved entry where Odysseus is played by a Jack Russell Terrier. None of those previous Odysseys were problematic, but the new one–which coincidentally has a black person and a trans person in it, in relatively small roles–is apparently so important to a left-wing culture war victory that Universal Pictures and thousands of movie theaters are all coordinating to fake ticket sales not only all over the country, but all over the planet. After all, this guy says so:

Man, those parentheses are doing a whole lot of work–I love how he just sprinkles in “fraud” and “already $400 million in the hole” without explaining what the fuck that is supposed to mean. Just to be clear, he’s talking about Christopher Nolan’s just-released The Odyssey, yes? Because that film blew past projections in its opening weekend to make $124 million at the domestic box office and $264.1 million globally, well on its way to another likely $1 billion cume. It’s the biggest opening weekend and worldwide opening of Nolan’s storied, hit-filled career as a major Hollywood motion picture and aesthete perfectionist director, even bigger than Oppenheimer, which racked up scads of awards in 2023.

It’s also an extremely well-received film by both professional and casual audiences–as of this morning, it boasts a 94% fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes with 426 reviews in the system, and a score of 8.5 on IMDB. Its audience score on RT stands at an ultra-impressive 97% fresh, with more than 10,000 ratings. Would you believe that’s the source of another conspiracy theory, though? The fact that this rating is calculated by the scores assigned solely by people who have verifiably seen the film strikes MAGA America as distinctly unfair–clearly, the score should be based on “whoever wants to assign a score for any reason because they’re very, very angry.” As long as you include the audience scores that I saw in a dream last night rather than ones from people who have actually been to the theater, the TRUE number apparently drops to 56%.

By the way: You have to appreciate that even in their own fantasy, they’ve still created a scenario where the majority of people liked The Odyssey. They can’t even imagine being in the majority!

There are more conspiracies to be had, of course. There’s the guy below, for instance, claiming that the nefarious goal of The Odyssey is to “pacify” people and “make them okay with civilization collapsing.” In no way does the credibility of this individual suffer by his subsequent pivot to claiming that Hollywood filmmaker Christopher Nolan has “sacrificed to Baal.” Although one would think that if the infernal powers really were to blame for the film’s success, they should have been able to fake its audience scores without leaving the true scores behind for the world’s dumbest internet detectives to find.

In this sort of way, the logic of Odyssey conspiracy theories mirrors the same deeply contradictory approach that MAGA Americans are forced to apply to so many other issues in their daily lives. The enemy, be it a film studio or the Democratic Party, is simultaneously all-powerful, able to coordinate fake audiences in thousands of movie theaters or a stolen election in 2020, and easily uncovered and defeated by a few Google searches at the same time. Universal Pictures can pay off thousands of film critics around the globe, but it can’t hide its obvious fraud, leaving MAGA America feeling like surely vindication and justice is right around the corner–I’m sure the Justice Department is just about to announce its indictment of Christopher Nolan. The Democrats, likewise can steal the 2020 election even while Trump (and his hand-picked election security personnel) are in office, but then they simply forget to do so in 2024 while Joe Biden is President and welcome Trump back into office, even as Elon Musk is committing highly public election fraud with $1 million checks. This duality in how you depict your enemy, as simultaneously overpoweringly strong (to breed fear) and pathetically weak (to breed contempt), is a key tenant of the emergence of fascism.

The alternative, after all, would be for these people to admit to themselves that they are not part of a relevant, normal group of American citizenry, which would shatter their moral picture of themselves as speaking for the American everyman. They need for their racist, transphobic obsession with performers such as Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page to be central to not only their discourse but the wider American discourse, because if it’s not, it must mean that they simply have a weird fixation on black people or trans people. They can’t accept the simple reality that the average person walking down the street not only doesn’t know much about The Odyssey as a movie or a story, but they also don’t care in the slightest about whether a trans person portrays a Greek soldier in said story. They just want to see some monsters and ancient bloodshed, and I got some good news for you on that front! Also tough for Chud America/AI-loving America (one and the same) to accept: That no one wants to actually watch a feature-length, AI-generated Odyssey like the one Elon Musk just vowed Grok will produce by the end of 2026–you know, when it’s not being sued over its sexualized deepfakes.

The more intelligent members of the conservative commentariat, meanwhile, have already pivoted to attempts to retcon and embrace The Odyssey or portray it from a more flattering pro-America or pro-“western civilization” light in the hopes of riding on the film’s clearly successful coattails. Famously failed Hollywood screenwriter Ben Shapiro, for instance, pulled a 180 and labeled the film a “masterpiece,” attempting to tie its themes back to traditional conservative values. But as is so often the case, when you raise your fanbase (whoever those people might be) to be raging racists and credulous conspiracy nuts, they’re not easy to dissuade out of going down those paths. Shapiro’s embrace of the film was always destined to simply create more conspiracies, like the idea that the success of The Odyssey must somehow be tied to Israel and Zionism in order for Shapiro to favor it.

Hey, when you spend years teaching your audience to prefer fantasy to reality, don’t be surprised when they reject your fantasy and substitute their own.