Christopher Nolan In Panic as ‘Woke’ Odyssey On the Path to Become Rachel Zegler’s Snow White –  Hw

Um, there is a big focus on her love story um, with a guy who literally stalks her. Yeah. Weird. Weird. So, we didn’t do that this time. I’ll be like, “So, Homer, how do you feel about this screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?” The Odyssey trailer has done it again.

It’s now the most disliked Hollywood trailer since the Snow White adaptation starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot. Now, I already made a video about this trailer breaking a record. Back then, it became the most disliked trailer in Chris Nolan’s career. And at the time of reporting, it had about 81,000 dislikes, which you compare it to Oppenheimer, which had 6,000 dislikes.

I kind of thought that was the ceiling. It It definitely wasn’t because this new Countdown trailer has gone even one step further. We’re talking around 80% dislikes. And the only thing worse in memory is Snow White, which landed about 95%. Hey, I’m going to make a new Odyssey movie. Awesome. You make amazing movies.

We trust your judgment. Can’t wait to see who you cast. Lupita Nyong’o. Oh, she’s a great actress. Who is she going to play? Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy? The daughter of Zeus, the most beautiful woman in the world. You think that is her? See, it’s already sparking controversy. People are going to war over her, just like Helen of Troy, further proving my point.

No, people aren’t fighting because she’s beautiful. People are fighting because she isn’t. Christopher Nolan just built the most disliked trailer in his entire career. And the reason isn’t the plot, or the runtime, or the budget. It’s one word people keep throwing at this film like a grenade. Woke.

Because somehow, the director who never bowed to internet outrage is suddenly living Rachel Zegler’s Snow White nightmare all over again. Same script, different studio. Casting backlash, a co-star who can’t stop talking, and a trailer getting buried in dislikes before anyone’s even seen the film. If you thought Snow White was a one-time disaster, the Odyssey is here to prove Hollywood never learns.

Chris Nolan’s Odyssey has just surpassed Snow White as Hollywood’s most disliked trailer. Honestly, I can’t believe I’m saying most disliked trailer and Chris Nolan’s name in the same sentence. It has no weight or bearing on how good the movie will be. The movie looks fantastic, but everyone’s hating on the trailer specifically, obviously, for two reasons, Elliot Page’s role and then right now Lupita Nyong’o’s role and especially this clip in this image that’s in the trailer.

People are just tearing it apart because she’s playing Helen of Troy who’s supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. A woman so beautiful they’re willing to fight to the death for her. Let’s break this down piece by piece. First, we have to look at the playbook that destroyed Snow White. It failed because of many small problems that added up to bad reviews, online backlash, and comments from the lead actress that upset fans of the original story.

And to everyone who hates when I win, the winged victory came to the Louvre in pieces and people still line up to see her. And I can only hope that despite my flaws and despite my cracks and my breaks and there are many of them, that at every premiere and everything I do, people will wait in line to see. As you guys can see, Rachel Zegler’s having a really hard time dealing with the backlash surrounding Snow White and even though she’s trying to appear strong, in a viral interview, Zegler called the original 1937 animation extremely dated.

She criticized the prince for literally stalking Snow White. She proudly declared that her version wouldn’t be saved by the prince and that it wasn’t really about the love story at all. It sounded less like she was promoting a remake and more like she was arguing against the original film. I just mean that it’s no longer 1937 and we absolutely wrote a Snow White that is going to be saved by the prince.

She’s not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true. And so, it’s just a really incredible story for I think young people everywhere to see themselves in.

The audience felt like they were being lectured. They were told that the story they loved was outdated and problematic and that the new version was going to fix it. I mean, you know, the the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. Um there is a big focus on her love story um with a guy who literally stalks her.

Yeah. Weird. Weird. So, we didn’t do that this time. So, no So, no prince or a different kind of prince? We have a different approach to what I’m sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because like we cast him, guy in the movie, right? Andrew Burnap, great dude. Um it’s uh it’s one of those things that I think everyone’s going to have their assumptions about what it’s actually going to be, but uh it’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful.

Then came the political comments. In August 2024, Zegler tweeted a pro-Palestine message. In November following the US election, she wrote a post that many interpreted as hoping Trump supporters would never know peace. She later apologized saying she let her emotions get the better of her. But the damage was already done.

She had alienated half of the potential audience for a $270 million movie. Um let’s talk about this. Rachel Zegler, she’s the Snow White star. She had this profane post wishing Trump supporters no peace. Um take a look at that. She says um “Another 4 years of hatred. I’m here with you to cry, to yell, to hug.

May Trump supporters and Trump voters never know peace. Uh that’s your message. Disney apparently made her apologize for this. What do you think? Well, she should apologize. Also, what a liability to pick someone who hates the original Snow White opened on March 21, 2025 and bombed spectacularly.

The first weekend was weak, pulling in only $43 million domestically. The second weekend saw a staggering 66% drop. We just ruined this girl’s whole career and I don’t feel bad. You guys may already know Snow White is officially the worst movie of all time. It’s got 1.5 out of 10 stars. That is horrendous. The final worldwide gross couldn’t even cover the marketing budget.

It was a financial and critical disaster. And to make it worse, reports surfaced that Disney had to hire a social media expert to monitor her activity. Even the premiere was scaled back to avoid the controversy. The behind-the-scenes drama was just as messy. Jonah Platt, the son of producer Marc Platt, publicly blasted Zegler on Instagram.

He said she was being irresponsible and that her comments clearly hurt the movie. His father personally had even flown to New York to ask her to cool it, but she wasn’t having it at the time. But, what does any of this have to do with Christopher Nolan? The answer is almost everything. The controversies surrounding Nolan’s Odyssey follow the same playbook, but the stakes are even higher.

The first major parallel is the identity casting debate. When Zegler, a Latina actress, was cast as Snow White, critics argued that she didn’t match the original character’s description of skin as white as snow. Disney defended the choice, but the backlash was fierce and never really went away. With the Odyssey, Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.

Helen is famously described as the face that launched a thousand ships. She is a figure of Greek mythology whose entire character revolves around being the most beautiful woman in the world, traditionally depicted as fair-skinned. When fans pointed out that Nyong’o didn’t match that description, the backlash was swift.

They argued that if you are adapting one of the foundational texts of Western literature, you shouldn’t be surprised when the people who love that text catch you editing the parts that are clearly written on the page. Now, they just decided to call out everybody on the right as being racist. And so, suddenly now the Odyssey has become the latest culture war fodder.

So, obviously Lupita’s role being announced sparked a frenzy on X. For example, Matt Walsh posted, “We’re told that we shouldn’t object to Helen of Troy being portrayed as a black woman. And yet, if a major Hollywood studio made a film set in Africa and cast a white woman as the most beautiful woman in Africa, those same people would literally riot in the streets.

If, say, Sydney Sweeney was cast in the role, they would be driven to murderous violence. We all know this is the case.” And then, Nyong’o made the same mistake as Zegler. In an interview, she was asked what she would say to Homer, the author of the Odyssey. Her answer was dripping with sarcasm. She said she would ask him, “How do you feel about the screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent with them?” I’d be like, “So, Homer, how do you feel about this screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent

with them?” It was a direct attack on the original work. It was a modern-day judgment of a piece of ancient literature. It’s the extremely dated comment all over again. Nyong’o, like Zegler, used an interview to signal that she thinks her version is superior to the original. Furthermore, even the accidental casting leaks have added fuel to the fire.

Online outrage was massive over the rumor that Elliot Page was cast as the warrior Achilles. For months, fans were furious. They argued that this was a complete betrayal of the source material. WHAT IN THE HELL IS THIS? ARE YOU SERIOUSLY telling me that Elliot Page is now casted as Achilles IN THE ODYSSEY? WOW. WOW. [screaming] LIKE, WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING? HOW DO WE GO FROM BRAD PITT TO ELLIOT PAGE? THEY LOOK NOTHING ALIKE.

BRO, THIS MAKES absolutely no sense. What in the hell is Christopher Nolan doing? Christopher Nolan, where is the historical accuracy? We go from Brad Pitt in 2004 and now in 2026, we have Elliot Page now playing Achilles. It just doesn’t make any sense. We have that dumbass looking Cyclops. We have the dumbass looking people in the armor and now we have Elliot Page playing Achilles.

How does that even make sense? The countdown trailer for the Odyssey has been ratioed nearly five to one on YouTube. This is unprecedented for a Christopher Nolan film. For context, the trailer for Inception famously had only about 21 dislikes total. Odyssey, I showed you guys this yesterday. It’s just getting worse.

51,000 versus 265,000 dislikes. Too woke to watch. Paul is intentionally misunderstanding as always, right? Everybody knows why they cast a black woman as Helen of Troy. You have Elliot Page that’s being cast in this movie as like a Greek warrior or something like that. This is just simply not something people are interested in because they realize that it’s being done for a political reason.

The financial stakes are enormous. Snow White cost around 270 to 336 million dollars to make plus another 100 million dollars for marketing. That’s a huge exposure. The Odyssey has a production budget of 250 million dollars with marketing estimated at another 100 to 150 million dollars. Universal is exposed to potentially 400 million dollars.

If the movie flops, it won’t just be a bad weekend at the office. It could seriously damage Nolan’s reputation. He doesn’t have theme parks or streaming services to fall back on like Disney. His brand is his career. And get this, the budget is reportedly 250 million dollars. According to Variety, that ranks as perhaps the most expensive R-rated movie in history, topping the likes of Joker: Folie à Deux and Deadpool and Wolverine.

Conventional wisdom states that movies need to make at least two times their budget to turn a profit in theaters. So, The Odyssey will have to get to $500 million minimum. Snow White was a warning. It showed what happens when a studio and a lead actress treat the audience and the source material with contempt.

For $170 million, Disney learned a hard lesson. And what did Hollywood do? It studied the receipts, counted the losses, and then 11 months later, Christopher Nolan announced The Odyssey. The movie hits theaters July 17th, and it might be the day Hollywood watches another legacy collapse in real time. So, what do you think? Are fans right to be worried about The Odyssey? Is Christopher Nolan making the same mistakes as Disney? Let us know in the comments.

And if you enjoyed this video, please hit that like button, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you don’t miss our next video.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.