Once again, Christopher Nolan is bucking a convention of modern studio filmmaking. The writer-director — who already started selling tickets a year out, engineered a new camera, and kept the first teaser off the internet entirely for his latest, The Odyssey — is now rethinking who gets the see the movie early and when.
For the last decade or so, studios have made it standard for the first set of reactions to hit social media come from a carefully selected cohort of influencers. These quick appraisals tend to hit platforms well before the embargo on full-length critical reviews lifts and are more-or-less uniformly positive — and that’s by design.
These word-of-mouth screenings are a studios way of controlling what the first draft of critical consensus looks like, and while their positive notions don’t always stick (e.g., Supergirl), they’re an understandably helpful tool in crafting a pre-release narrative for major releases.
So why is one of the highest-profile releases of the summer skipping those screenings entirely?
Christopher Nolan is an influencer
Because of Nolan’s status as Hollywood’s primary popular auteur (The man made a J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic into a blockbuster), his is the only voice that matters when it comes to The Odyssey. This has arguably been the approach throughout Universal’s marketing campaign for the film. One just has to glance at the first teaser poster for a succinct rundown of what the studio is actually trying to sell here.
“Christopher Nolan.” “The Odyssey.” “This is when you need to show up.” The Universal marketing department could have sent everyone home early that day.
Hype is a foregone conclusion
A word-of-mouth screening is an attempt to control the critical shorthand for whether a film is “supposed to be good.” The right tweet finds the right friend, and they tell the group text that they heard good things. Now, if your buddy sent the same message about the new Christopher Nolan, the response may understandably be, “Yeah, no s–t.”
The track record that Nolan has wisely established for himself is that his films are both broadly popular and merit viewing on the biggest screen possible. Until his films start to suggest otherwise, quality is going to be the presumption.
Therefore, managing hype is the priority
But when quality is the presumption, a studio has to be careful. If the influencer set managed to get into The Odyssey early — assuming it’s watchable, of course — it’s reasonable to guess that reactions would fall somewhere between “Citizen Kane dead in a ditch” and “I have beheld the true nature of art, beauty, and the secret to all life, and it is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Run, don’t walk.”
That kind of hyperbole is what backlashes are made of.
More eyeballs, more spoilers
Is it absurdly overprotective to worry about spoilers for a retelling of one of the most ancient works of literature? Sure, but this is Nolan we’re talking about. Part of his respect for the cinematic experience comes from reverence for just that: the experience. He wants people to sit down, put away their phones, and engage with something together. Pithy notions written to score the most likes can only muddy that.
