Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened July 17, 2026, with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page as the warrior Sinon. It earned $124.5 million in the US and $264 million worldwide in its opening weekend — Nolan's biggest since The Dark Knight Rises, topping Oppenheimer. Critics praised it. The backlash started weeks earlier.

1. Nolan "Desecrated Homer" (Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, Rob Finnerty of Newsmax)

The culture-war case against the casting arrived before anyone had seen a frame of the film.

This is casting for awards, not for the poem. On July 6, X owner Elon Musk posted that Nolan "desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar. What a worm." Forbes had already reported that Musk spent months before that "boosting misinformation" about the film in what reporters called a "days-long crusade" against it.

The poems describe Helen as "white-armed" and "godlike." Matt Walsh, a commentator at The Daily Wire, argued from that text that no one would see Lupita Nyong'o as Helen — his point being that the character has a fixed identity in Homer that diverse casting erases.

Elliot Page's casting drew the most personal reaction. Rob Finnerty, a Newsmax anchor, reacted on air to early rumors that Page would play Achilles — a role Brad Pitt played in the 2004 film Troy: "We've gone from Brad Pitt to a girl who dresses as a guy, who's 5 foot 1, 118 pounds." Page ultimately plays the warrior Sinon, not Achilles.

2. But Scholars Say the Race Argument Is Wrong (Joel Christensen, Daniel Mendelsohn, Chris Cotonou)

Classical scholars say the culture-war reading of Homer's casting gets the text completely wrong.

Homer never calls Helen "the most beautiful woman in the world." That line isn't in the poems. Joel Christensen, a Homer scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, also points out that the Iliad and Odyssey came from Ionian Greek communities along the coast of Asia Minor — communities with deep contact with surrounding cultures. Bronze Age Greek identity doesn't map onto any modern racial category. The late Howard University classicist Frank Snowden documented extensive contact between ancient Greeks and Black Africans in his book Blacks in Antiquity.

Helen was born from a swan's egg. Daniel Mendelsohn, who translated the Odyssey in 2025, called the racial complaints "silly" on that basis: "She was hatched from a swan's egg, so how literal can we really be?" Homer's Helen is a mythological character, not a historical one. Mendelsohn calls it a category error.

Some classicists also have complaints about the film — just not Musk's. One scholar who spoke to Variety said the "woke" framing is "surprising because the film is actually very conservative" — diverse casting "features women of color who just get to be married to white men." Others told Variety that Nolan watered down Homer's sophisticated moral complexity in favor of spectacle. Chris Cotonou, a Greek-British journalist, argued that the real oversight was casting no Greek or Mediterranean actors in an adaptation of "foundational Greek literature."

3. Still, the Film Made $264M (Christopher Nolan, Lupita Nyong'o)

Nolan's answer to the pre-release fight was to wait — and then point to the ticket sales.

People went anyway. The film's $264M global opening placed it third in the US for 2026, behind only Toy Story 5 and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Early critic reviews were universally positive before any of the controversy reached wider audiences.

The controversy didn't change Nolan's plans. He told Forbes on July 10: "These conversations that happen before people see the film — they're always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet." He said he designed the film to feel "very fresh for modern audiences" and deliberately moved away from "cultural assumptions about the ancient world." He called Musk's backlash "irrelevant" in a separate Variety interview. Nyong'o's answer was even shorter: "Our cast is representative of the world. I'm not spending my time thinking of a defense."

Where This Lands

Musk's camp says Nolan cast for Oscar eligibility, not for Homer — that Nyong'o and Page are wrong choices for a Greek epic. Classical scholars say that argument rests on a misreading of the text. Homer's Helen was never real, never defined by modern racial categories, and emerged from stories told in a culturally mixed world. But some of those same scholars have their own concerns. Some say Nolan's adaptation is too conservative about women's roles. Others say Greek culture deserved Greek actors. Nolan has the box office and keeps moving.

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