The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan epic won't be screened for social media influencers - but is that a good thing?

Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

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Universal is said to be skipping the usual approach of inviting social media influencers to an early screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. A few thoughts: If you have hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok or Instagram, don’t necessarily expect an invite to an early screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. According to a ... The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan epic won’t be screened for social media influencers – but is that a good thing?

Universal is said to be skipping the usual approach of inviting social media influencers to an early screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. A few thoughts:

If you have hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok or Instagram, don’t necessarily expect an invite to an early screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. According to a report at The Hollywood Reporter, Universal has decided to “skip having word-of-mouth (a.k.a. influencer screenings)” for the filmmaker’s forthcoming mythological epic.

What does this mean exactly? Glad you asked. In recent years, you may have noticed that the release of a major film – often one involving superheroes – is accompanied by a wave of highly excitable, positive reactions on places like Instagram or the hellsite formerly known as Twitter.

That’s because studio marketing departments have, for perhaps the past decade, increasingly begun to invite online-famous people with large follower counts to early screenings. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. The slightly sneakier part is that those marketers will set two embargoes: an early date for social media reactions and a later (sometimes much later) one for full reviews.

This is why a movie like 2023’s The Flash was initially hailed as a comic book masterpiece, but then some rather more sombre reviews emerged a few weeks later. These days, it’s often the breathlessly enthusiastic tweets that end up being quoted on film posters.

Again, according to THR, Universal will buck this trend with The Odyssey. The film will have its premiere in London on the 6th July, and then there’ll be screenings for ‘professional critics’.

Although this isn’t specified outright in that report, my best guess is that Universal won’t be holding a big, splashy multimedia screening for the new Nolan. These early previews have been going on way before Instagram was a twinkle in the internet’s eye – as the name implies, they’re basically a means of showing a forthcoming movie to everyone from traditional newspaper and magazine film journalists to broadcasters to humble bloggers.

In recent years, social media influencers have also been thrown into the multimedia mix – which might be why increasingly elaborate photo opportunities have become an increasingly common sight at these screenings.

What’s unclear is who Universal will class as an influencer rather than a professional critic. Dedicated, traditional film critics are a dying breed, as cash-strapped publishers shut various sections of their newspapers and scrap magazines entirely. That’s a depressing situation by itself. But these days, some of the most interesting writing and commentary on movies comes from websites and YouTubers. Will they still be invited, or will Universal’s marketers mark them as “fan-site bloggers and influencers” (to quote THR again)?

Some of the online reactions to the news have been positive (“Good – influencers are a pox” wrote someone on Reddit). But it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t influencers that created this climate – it was marketers. Rather than further an even greater us-and-them mentality around people who write and comment about film, the easier route might be to drop the two-tier embargo system instead.

The Odyssey is in cinemas from the 17th July.