in the day After its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan’s film. The Odysseyin one of the few remaining theaters in the Northeast equipped to project large-format, super-high-resolution 70mm IMAX films.

I arrived to find groups of loafers in “NOLAN” sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, complaining outside the theater. The power had gone out and the 8 a.m. screening The Odyssey it would have to be cancelled. Stressed employees manually wrote down ticket numbers to issue refunds (when the computers came back online) and handed out vouchers, apologizing. Viewers complained about not being able to see the film (in its intended format, as soon as possible) and wasting a day’s worth of PTO. A thought crossed my mind: Maybe it was sabotage?

Threats against Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Homeric epic have dogged the film, basically since its announcement. A certain breed of terminal online right-wingers, legitimized and amplified by none other than Elon Musk, on his own echo chamber social media platform, have been pulling their oars against the film and the prevailing tide of public enthusiasm for it. For a bunch of mostly stupid reasons: the casting of black and trans actors, or Matt Damon as the cunning Odysseus; the Americanized English dialect; ahistorical ship designs; the fact that Tom Holland says “dad” in the trailer; many had written The Odyssey out, unseen, as nothing less than a “psychological operation” designed to undermine Western culture. An X user attacked Nolan as an enemy of the “West.”

Even the almost unanimous good reviews (He Odyssey currently has a 96 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes) were seen as part of a “woke conspiracy.” These self-proclaimed Odyssey Haters conspired to reject trailers for the film and generally campaigned against seeing the film.

But there was no sabotage at the Royal King of Prussia Cinema. The local power grid map shows dozens of similar outages across the region, attributable to recent episodes of extreme weather. And I was told that this theater, specifically, had suffered outages in recent weeks.

Adding a few hundred morning movie soldiers walking away from a multiplex and a few thousand dollars in lost theater revenue, the boycott against The Odyssey It is shaping up to be a tremendous failure. Advance ticket sales, including sold-out IMAX screenings nationwide, indicate a global box office return of $200 million. This would make it the most profitable opening for any of Christopher Nolan’s films that do not feature the Batman character. Resale markets have seen tickets reaching $1,000… for a movie! It wouldn’t be surprising if The Odyssey raises $1 billion globally, when all is said and done.

People are reserving their free time at work to watch the movie. Fans are crossing state and national borders to see the film on the biggest screens possible. Earlier this week, a story circulated about a California woman who delayed her pregnancy so as not to ruin the opportunity to see the film opening weekend in IMAX 70mm. I myself traveled about an hour and change back and forth just to No see it.

The disjunction between the anti-Odyssey The reaction and the actual organic fandom of the film is telling. Despite the best efforts of some of the worst people in the world, you can’t stifle the basic human desire to see big-name actors on huge screens, fighting huge monsters and sleeping with witches. You can downvote a trailer. But the dreams of the general movie-going public cannot be dismissed.