Opinion | Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ Shows That Epics Are Better Without AI
That appears to be precisely what viewers are responding to, turning “The Odyssey” not simply into successful however a cultural phenomenon, with some individuals touring by aircraft for the prospect to see it in IMAX 70 millimeter. (As The New York Post reportedManhattan’s solely theater to point out the movie in that format is bought out for each screening by means of Aug. 19.) There would possibly appear to be a contradiction between its absence of eye sweet and its success as a spectacle. But AI has rendered eye sweet low cost. Viewers lengthy for the visceral.
One of this 12 months’s few nice surprises is that individuals are going again to the flicks. During the pandemic, there have been many predictions that film theaters had been dying, changed by the comforts of streaming video. While the gloomiest forecasts proved overwrought, in recent times, the development has nonetheless been one among decline. American field workplace gross sales had been decrease in 2024 than they had been in 2023, and continued to disappoint in 2025. This 12 months, nevertheless, is on observe to be the most effective one for ticket gross sales since 2019. Young individuals, looking forward to communal experiences, have been flocking to theaters; based on a study by Fandango, Gen Z is now essentially the most energetic moviegoing demographic.
What’s putting, although, is not simply that individuals are returning to theaters, it is the kind of movies they are going to. Recent motion pictures that look synthetic — together with “Supergirl,” the live-action “Moana” and “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” — have flopped. By distinction, the low-budget horror motion pictures “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” which depend on scary premises somewhat than otherworldly imagery, have been monumental hits. “Audiences in 2026 are sending a clear message to filmmakers: We want movies to look real — and for you to sweat while making them,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd.
There isn’t any larger champion of hands-on, analog filmmaking than Nolan, who does not even personal a smartphone. Speaking to The Telegraph’s Collin, he celebrated younger individuals’s rejection of AI “I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” mentioned Nolan. As a consequence, he mentioned, “after years of driving toward heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
It is that this ethos, greater than multiracial casting, that makes “The Odyssey” a rebuke to Musk’s ideology, with its video game-derived visions of grandeur and conviction that algorithms could make artwork. He’s in all probability proper to hate it. He’s improper that his machines might ever conjure something shut.
