Go woke, get rich: why rightwing hate campaigns don’t affect the box office

After a bigoted online backlash, led by Elon Musk, The Odyssey achieved a monster weekend – the latest example of a targeted takedown that didn’t work

The Odyssey: jaw-dropping action, dark magic and dolphin cameos – discuss with spoilers

Elon Musk was a man on a mission. Yes, he’s supposedly intent on colonizing Mars, or the moon, or maybe, if you give him some more time to move the goalposts, just a really, really tall mountain, but this spring, a more pressing task presented itself, a sequel to his early-2026 mission to post white supremacist rhetoric: take down Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which he decided was the latest of “woke Hollywood’s” attempts to spread racial animus (towards white people, of course) and win Oscars while doing so. Nolan, Musk explained to the trade publication Variety, was “pissing on Homer’s grave”, referring to the author of the film’s epic-poem source material.

As the final phases of the movie’s promotional campaign ramped up, Musk posted dozens of times on his self-owned social media platform with grievances related to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o (a Black woman) and Elliot Page (a trans man) in the movie, often spreading false statements about this casting existing to satisfy new Oscar requirements. (As detailed here, those new Oscar diversity requirements are extremely flexible, and often satisfied by studio-wide programs that have nothing to do with casting. The Odyssey did not need to hire Oscar winner Nyong’o to be eligible for awards.) Musk may be a divisive-at-best figure who large swaths of the population do not take seriously, but he commands enough attention and adulation from a vocal minority that plenty of online accounts were soon parroting his willful misunderstanding of Hollywood and The Odyssey. Many of them abruptly and hilariously zeroed in on the 2004 movie Troy – which the right flank of social media suddenly decided was a beloved masterpiece, rather than its own, far greater distortion of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.
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