Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey hit theaters as one of the most stacked ensemble films in years, and for the last few days it's basically been the only thing anyone at Barstool wants to talk about. Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Robert Pattinson playing a suitor -- the cast list alone is doing a lot of the marketing. Clem summed up just how absurd it got once he actually sat with the credits.
I knew the cast was good but it’s actually absurd. Danny Glover, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, Christopher Lloyd, Adrien Brody, Matthew McCounaghey, Tony Danza, and Home Alone 2 Pigeon Lady (RIP)
That's the split screen right now. On one side you've got the Project Big Screen crew treating this thing like a religious experience -- Robbie Fox calling it 'top tier Nolan,' Jeff D. Lowe going to bat for Ludwig Goransson as the greatest film composer of a generation, Jack Kennedy flatly declaring 'Nolan is a god.' On the other side, Macrodosing's PFT Commenter reportedly called it both the best AND worst film he's seen in 2026 within the same day, which tells you everything about how split the reactions have been. Somewhere in between, Chief and Eric Hubbs are still traumatized by a jump-scare trailer for a movie called 'Other Mommy' that Barstool says ran right before showtime and gave half the theater a mini panic attack.
But the funniest thread running through all of this isn't the movie itself -- it's the press tour fatigue. Chicks in the Office looked at the endless parade of red-carpet stops, panel intros and podcast hits this cast has had to do and basically begged for mercy on their behalf.
The actors in ‘The Odyssey’ need a break! @trulyseltzer
It's a fair point buried in a joke. When you're rolling out a movie this size, with a cast this deep, the promotional grind doesn't stop at the premiere -- it's weeks of panels, junkets and pod hits, and eventually the jokes about it become their own genre of content. Jack Kennedy leaned all the way into that with a completely unrelated bit: a viral TikTok trend built off a joke that Chris Klemmer supposedly started, where people are grabbing wheelchairs just to skip sold-out IMAX lines.
Klemmer started a movement
And then there's Will Compton, who's been circling the discourse from a different angle entirely -- not the movie itself, but the wave of think-pieces trying to turn The Odyssey into a culture-war flashpoint. He flagged one particular write-up as the platonic ideal of a critic mad about something that has nothing to do with the film.
This is best “I wanted to waste my money on a movie ticket because I’m mad about something else” write-up you’ll see about The Odyssey
None of this is really about whether The Odyssey is good -- the pod circuit clearly can't agree on that anyway. It's about a movie so massive, so overexposed, and so meme-ready that every corner of Barstool's culture desk has found its own angle to mine it for content: the cast, the composer, the trailer that scared a theater half to death, the wheelchair grift, and now the actors themselves getting memed for looking exhausted. As long as The Odyssey stays in theaters, expect the jokes to keep outpacing the reviews.