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Elon Musk was a man on a mission. Yes, he probably wants to control Mars, or the moon, or maybe, if you give him more time to move the score, a really tall mountain, but this spring, a very difficult task presented itself, following his 2026 launch. mission to post white supremacist rhetoric: download about Christopher Nolan The Odysseywhich he thought was the latest in a “Hollywood revival” attempt to spread racial spirits (to white people, of course) and win Oscars in the process. Nolan, Musk explained to various trade publications, “to rage at Homer’s grave”, referring to the author of the film’s source poem.
As the final stages of the film’s promotional campaign ramped up, Musk posted several times on his personal social media page with complaints about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o (a Black woman) and Elliot Page (a transman) in the movie, often spreading lies about the cast to meet Oscar requirements. (As detailed HereThe requirements for the Oscar variety are very flexible, and are often satisfied by studio programs that have nothing to do with casting. Odyssey didn’t need to hire Oscar winner Nyong’o in order to win the award.) Musk may be a very divisive figure that many groups of people don’t think about, but he commands enough attention and praise from a few people who speak that many accounts on the Internet soon showed his willful misunderstanding of Hollywood and The Odys. Most of them suddenly and happily entered the 2004 movie Troy – which the right wing of social media thought was a beloved masterpiece, not his, the most disturbing of Homer’s poem The Iliad.
This story has a more familiar ending than the crash of Musk’s rocket: after weeks to months of anger over the failure to select a Greek team for a movie that also features cyclops, sea giants and a witch who turns men into pigs, The Odyssey has become. one of the most popular of the summerwith more than $260m in the bank already, on track to improve Troy’s inflation rate. (In raw dollars, they’ve already been made in the US.) The shouts of “go woke, go break” were drowned out by Nolan’s need to combine classic Hollywood action with minimal forms of filming, editing and, yes, casting.
It is easy to say that doomsaying everyone about the expectations of The Odyssey he was stubbornly ignoring many things, including, but not limited to, the most famous film director currently working; a cast full of big names across generations of races and ethnicities; The fact that some non-white actors don’t exactly scream “forced diversity” when three of the film’s main stars are Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland; and, in the week leading up to release, the best reviews.
It would also be easy, if arrogant, to say that to many people, critics of “woke” films are seen as the force behind anti-woke clicktivism. So The Odyssey (95% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) is affected by conflicts, whether real or imagined, while other opponents are right like Supergirl (53% positive), which manages its star unknowingly accepting the difficulties of being a woman, or Snow White (39% positive), managing its star to be mixed race and not have enough protection, not enough protection.
Perhaps there is some truth to this, though it may have less to do with the critics than with too much personal preference in selecting winners. The internet buzz that seems to be affecting movies more than ever isn’t about getting up as much as the movie itself. A movie like The Odyssey or Obsession overperforms, making more fun out of its performance, making it work better; A movie like Supergirl can be considered a loser from the moment the initial box office numbers come in (so, basically, about 12 hours after release).
However, culture warriors like to claim victory wherever they can, so they point to movies like Supergirl or Snow White as proof that audiences don’t want women to be heroes, princesses to be anything other than white, or anything else they can come up with. This excitement does not tell the whole story: in the opening weekend of Snow White, for example, the publication of Hollywood’s advertising Last Day – not exactly left-field – went deep into the box office. Conversioncompared to an average breakdown of 63-37 between the voting areas “blue” and “red”-areas voting for sales of tickets for family films, Snow White, at a 60-40 split, saw slightly above average performance in the red areas. His limited numbers were not seen as political. “There were no red herrings because of the conflicts that Snow White is known for,” analyst Steve Buck told Deadline at the time.
Even some of the most advanced tests of the group on toldja-so do not count in the long run. Ten years ago, the middling numbers of the all-female Ghostbusters reboot resulted in no more sequels, right-wing culture soldiers declared victory, and returned to the studio for the highly-respected sequel, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. What’s next? A respectable $1.1m increase at the domestic box office (so, the absolute attendance; maybe a little less, given five-year inflation) and a slight decline worldwide, for a slight decline. The 2024 follow-up took place in almost the same way. Perhaps the figures near the uniform are the starting point of interest in the new Ghostbusters movie, rather than a referendum on women in ghostbusting? In fact, movies from Barbie to Superman to The bad guy to Sinnersall the stories of different types of rightwing whining about different types of awakening, have become very popular in recent years. This isn’t used for right-wing protests, either: Shout 7 sparked angry online chatter from the left about a boycott because Melissa Barrera, star of the previous two films, was fired for speaking out about the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israel. This didn’t seem to move the real needle, as the film quickly became Scream (and without the benefit of positive reviews to back it up).
Of course, these are still individual films. But a growing body of research also shows that audiences aren’t particularly drawn to diverse groups — and they can be drawn to them. Earlier this year, UCLA annual Hollywood Variety Report found that films with between 40 and 50% Black, Indian and colored (right-wing horror Bipoc) had the highest average and international box office, confirming that in the United States, about 45% of the population is Bipoc. This was true for a last year’s reporttoo. Actually, it’s hard to find good evidence to avoid any movie. It is not something that most ordinary people think about.
None of this will stop the next wave of half-baked, half-fooled outrage. We should be better off ignoring it for now, but because of its origins, people like Musk are willing to expand into our food supply regardless of how small a minority they represent. In the meantime, self-proclaimed-if-I-am-and-o-ofuses like the Hard Drinking YouTuber will go back to pretending they’re just watching movies and analyzing culture, instead of trying to get upset over a black Oscar-winning actor playing a beautiful character. The scene will be seen as Circe (Samantha Morton) coaxes Odysseus’ men back to humanity after turning them into resting pigs: “Return to your hiding places,” she says grimly of their human form. But maybe after the blockbuster success of this “awakening” version of The Odyssey, the secrets will be difficult to maintain.
