Chris Nolan
And Rotten Tomatoes
Most of the takes I’ve seen on the Odyssey have been related to the race of the cast. I’m half indian and half irish, which is so niche that I can’t relate to the vast majority of race-related experiences. There haven’t been any half irish half indian characters that a big director casted as a mexican guy. It doesn’t make me feel any type of way, truly.
My 3 big takeaways from the whole thing are:
Christopher Nolan’s casting really got everyone talking, and maybe that was the whole point. The meta in modern media economy is to elicit a response. All press is good press. Rage-bate, vague-bate, as long as there’s some bate. He built distribution (bate) into the product (film).
People care about film directors more than I thought. I was listening to TBPN on the way home and they said (and the internet confirmed) that the vast majority of people, when asked, said Christopher Nolan was the reason they went to go see the Odyssey.
Not the start studded cast of Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom holand, Zendaya, the list goes on… AND also not because it’s one of the most famous old stories in human history. Getting an S tier Director drastically de-risks a film. As someone who’d like to see Hollywood take more risks and make less re-makes / sequels, I hope that this becomes a playbook for how to do it.
Rotten Tomatoes is fake news. Maybe I’m the only person that wasn’t aware of this, but when you see a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%, that does not mean the average rating was 90%. It means that 90% of people rated the movie positively - meaning above a 50%. So a movie with 100 ratings of 60% will have 100% rating, but a movie with 7 100% ratings, and 3 49% ratings, will have a rating of 70%. Feels fake and dumb, but who am I to judge!
Thanks,
Kieran