Hackers Expose Rotten Tomatoes Plot to Rig 'Odyssey' Reviews | Headline USA

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(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Some have called Christopher Nolan’s remake of The Odyssey an epic conquest for the ages; others call it a three-hour golden fleecing.

To some conservatives, it may seem a siren song, beckoning its unwitting moviegoers to engage in cultural destruction due to its historical revisionism of a Western canonical treasure.

But according to online sleuths, the movie is, most of all, a Trojan horse, stealthily using subterfuge and guile to deceive and manipulate its marks by appearing to be something it isn’t.

The movie is accused of suppressing negative reviews and using fuzzy math to minimize the perception of backlash in order to create a façade of organic buzz like that which Nolan rode to acclaim during 2023’s “Barbenheimer” craze.

“Perhaps a handful of trolls—a small group that includes the richest man in the world—has sworn off Nolan’s film because its cast has the audacity to feature both a Black woman and a trans man,” crowed Vanity Fair. “But loud as their voices may be, the actual grosses prove that they couldn’t dampen The Odyssey’s prospects.”

Industry insiders have claimed, as of Sunday, that the film’s financial intake has made it an unqualified success, with its $368,060,231 worldwide gross well exceeding its $250 million production budget.

Meanwhile, some argue that controversial casting decisions — such as transgender performer Elliot Page in the role of Greek warrior Sinon, Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, and anti-ICE activist John Leguizamo as the wise and loyal Eumaeus — have weaponized culture-war outrage into its own market force, fueling free word-of-mouth exposure while writing off the boycotts and complaints of a few as collateral damage.

“One could take this outcome as evidence that the right-wing campaign against the film actually helped it by turning the film into a liberal cause célèbre, if one were interested in being wrong,” Vanity Fair claimed.

“The real truth is that normal people, regular folks whose brains haven’t been pickled by constant exposure to the worst opinions on the internet, are unaware of this manufactured controversy,” the magazine continued. “And even if they have heard about it, they certainly aren’t letting it influence their viewing habits.”

As one might expect, the film’s marketing executives have touted a litany of five-star reviews from media outlets that, in many cases, may have had promotional sponsorship agreements with the studio.

However, a Reddit user claimed to have dug into the metadata on leading review site Rotten Tomatoes and discovered that it was actively suppressing negative reviews.

The thread went on to explain how users themselves could access the backend files to show the actual breakdown of reviews.

“A score of 97% is mathematically impossible (combined with faked ticket sales) and this is looking more and more like widespread FRAUD by the Hollywood Industry on a MASSIVE scale,” wrote YouTube film critic “Mr. Obvious.”

Although Rotten Tomatoes claimed the film had a 97% favorable audience reception, its JSON files indicated that the true score was only 56%. That would rank it in the same echelon with films like the 1982 Burt Reynolds/Dolly Parton classic The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Unfortunately for Nolan, the film’s critical reception did not fare as well as the widely panned superhero movie The Marvels, which also drew backlash over its DEI casting but still pulled off a viewer rating of 59%.

Critics further accused the film of padding its ticket sales and using false comparisons to make its attendance numbers seem much more robust than they really were.

“Needless to say despite the reported numbers/revenue (and opening at box office numbers) its [sic] looking like smoke and mirrors, the film is being propped up to LOOK like a success but in reality is a CATACLYSMIC financial failure. (might not even break even),” Mr. Obvious noted.

“I also have a sneaking suspicion they are manipulating ticket sales buy preordering tickets and very likely canceling those orders at the very last second, otherwise, they are BURNING money ($375 million already) it seems desperate—they are in too deep,” the podcaster added.

In addition to the film’s alleged use of dummy ticket sales and reliance on pre-sale seats purchased up to a year ago (long before its casting controversies surfaced), some have sought to point out ticket-price disparities in comparison to past blockbusters like Nolan’s 2008 breakout hit, The Dark Knight. Since many of the Odyssey tickets were sold for IMAX theaters, they included a major price markup while couching the misleading figures on actual attendance.

As online film critic OMB Reviews further noted, the actual intake needed to offset the movie’s marketing costs and the cut to theaters would be three times the actual production budget, or around $750 million, just to break even.

“The Nolan Bros can keep running their mouths, but at the end of the day this movie is not likely to stand the test of time over the coming years,” said the post, likely referring to Nolan’s fanatical supporters and not his actual siblings.

As word broke of the deception, some X users mocked it with a mashup nod to other recent allegations of blatant meddling in U.S. political elections.

Meanwhile, former trillionaire Elon Musk hinted that he might be open to creating an alternate, non-woke version of Home’s epic tale.

Musk originally teased that he would bankroll a Mel Gibson project to do an authentic version in its original Greek.

But he later seemed to backtrack, suggesting the entire movie could be completed more efficiently using Grok’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.