A Trojan Horse Only Works Once: Why Universal’s Decision to Skip Influencer Screenings for ‘The Odyssey’ Is Good for the Entire Movie Business

The following article is an excerpt from the latest edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

Something beautiful happened in America last week. No, I’m not talking about the Great American State Fair (an event attended by former TV Superman Dean Cain and seemingly 10-12 other people), nor the episode of “Love Island USA” where Bryce and Trinity were reunited at last after surviving the Homeric trial of Casa Amor (which technically went down in Fiji). I’m not even talking about the life-affirming performance that took place before the Los Angeles premiere of “Monsters & Minions,” where several very talented women performed songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “I’ll Be There” entirely in Minionese. 

Hard as it is to believe, that wasn’t even the most righteous and/or restorative thing that Universal’s publicity team managed to pull off over the last seven days. On the contrary, that distinction belongs to the studio’s widely praised decision to skip influencer screenings for Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” in order to let critics own — or at least participate in — the first official word on the summer’s biggest movie.

The story was broken by The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd, who wrote that it “bucks the trend of studios getting ahead of professional reviews by inviting fan-site bloggers and influencers to screen major releases in advance and then letting them post (often highly enthusiastic) mini reviews on social media.” In the case of “The Odyssey,” critics in major cities will have an opportunity to see the movie in advance of its social media embargo on the afternoon of July 6, with published reviews to follow a full nine days later (junket attendees screened it on June 29th, but are prohibited from sharing their thoughts in public until the social embargo date). Some of the critics in attendance next week may choose not to say anything about Nolan’s epic until their work is published in full, as most of us would prefer that studios did away with social embargoes completely, but all of us will surely appreciate having such a healthy window of time to formulate their thoughts.

This represents an abrupt — and extremely welcome — pivot away from the strategy that Universal deployed in advance of “Disclosure Day” last month, when influencers and junketeers had weeks to hype it up as “the best Steven Spielberg movie in 20 years” while most critics were only invited to see the alien thriller the night before their reviews were due to be published (an inexplicably and perversely common practice that does a grave disservice to writers, readers, and of course the films themselves). Ditto the studio’s approach to Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” back in 2023, which wasn’t really unveiled to anyone until the week of its release.

To be clear, this is more of a universal problem than a Universal problem — they just happen to distribute a disproportionate number of the big movies that actually matter. And to their great credit, it would seem as if they’re starting to realize the weight of that responsibility, as well as how to capitalize on it. This is obviously good news for me, someone who reviews movies for a living. But I would argue that it’s also good news for you, someone who presumably enjoys reading about and watching them. Because the issue at stake here is not about a need for the critics to be first, it’s about a need for the discourse to be trusted. 

As IndieWire’s own Christian Zilko recently suggested, there are several reasons why Universal may have opted to buck this widespread — but increasingly transparent — approach to gaming positive buzz for a blockbuster release. One is that “The Odyssey” simply doesn’t need it, as hype is already at an all-time high, and the likes of performative TikToks and euphoric TV ads (“The best movie since the last one I was invited to see early in exchange for an orgasmic pull-quote!” raves GeekTragedy.net) would only serve to diminish the stature of a product that naturally exists on a higher cultural echelon than any other studio tentpole this year. 

Another, much less sensible explanation that’s been put forth is that Universal might be taking a page from the Trojans in a bid to preserve the element of surprise. Yes, “The Odyssey” is one of the oldest stories ever told, but a Christopher Nolan movie whose hero is haunted by memories of their living wife!? It’s the multiplex equivalent of Dylan going electric. 

Of course, the most compelling reason for this new course of action is that even casual moviegoers have cottoned on to the staggered cadence of early reactions. The classic “hype and fall” approach. The first screenings are reserved for people whose job it is to help promote the movie, and only then, several days after rapturous social media posts have saturated the internet, are there screenings for people whose job it is to critique the movie. 

It was a pre-existing model that Marvel perfected within an inch of its life: A wave of ecstasy cresting into a cold reality check, the initial response so giddy that even the most approving of critics tend to seem like joyless scolds by comparison. That approach worked well enough during the age of Ultron, when Hollywood shamelessly catered to “the fans” at all costs, but the scales have started to fall from people’s eyes at a time when audiences have grown wary of empty promises — a time when regular civilians study the Tomatometer™ like they have a personal stake in its scores, and then gamble their money on prediction markets in order to fulfill that dystopian corporate fantasy. In an understandably cynical moment when a guy named Sincere is the most two-faced boy in the villa, the “My Christian Dior” Knicks fan was a covert ad for Kalshi, and everything of actual importance is also bad and built on bullshit, trustworthy sources are more valuable than ever. 

‘The Odyssey’

Of course, that’s a mighty self-serving conclusion for someone in my position to draw from recent developments, and I can appreciate why it might seem counterintuitive to suggest that massive corporations should expose their $300 million blockbuster investments to more risk by allowing critics to weigh in on them as the same time as the popcorn salesmen. But with all due respect to junketeers and social media influencers (many of whom are smart, sincere, and self-evidently good at what they do in a way that feeds into the lifeblood of film culture), the fact is that offering equal access to critics — or at least allowing them reasonable conditions under which to do their jobs — is ultimately just as valuable to both movie studios and moviegoers alike in the long-term. 

A healthy film industry isn’t afraid of its critics. More to the point, a healthy film industry depends on critics to keep it that way — or at least to diagnose the symptoms of its decline. Openly rigging the initial reaction to a major new release is a short-term solution for a systemic problem that it makes worse by trying to cover up. 

Manufactured or otherwise dubious enthusiasm might generate a wave of “we are so back” retweets and even goose the opening weekend grosses, but conditioning people to distrust the hype could — and will — vastly diminish the studios’ power to mobilize the masses when they have something truly special to sell. As established IP like “Supergirl” continues to become less valuable than auteur showcases like “Sinners” and word-of-mouth originals like “Obsession,” moviegoers’ faith in the specialness of what they’re paying to see will only grow increasingly valuable (and it’s already priceless). 

How movies are sold to the public is constantly evolving, and influencer culture is going to play a crucial role in that process for the foreseeable future. To wish the whole thing away wouldn’t just be a needless waste of the Reese Feldmans and Patrick Tomassos of the world, it would also be as anachronistically absurd as demanding that Matt Damon promote “The Odyssey” on “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” instead of “Hot Ones” or “Chicken Shop Date.” Media promotion has to keep up with the times in order to be effective, and that’s especially true for Hollywood movies, which respond to what’s happening with a lot more lag than pretty much every other popular art form these days. 

But the movies can’t survive on promotion alone. As the explosive success of Letterboxd would attest, the movies — a now-archaic form sustained by its size, scale, and enduring ability to confer some measure of cultural primacy upon everything that gets projected onto a theater screen — uniquely depend upon an active and genuine discourse in order to retain what’s left of their relevance. Good, bad, or anywhere in between, they thrive on the dialogue engendered by the magic of a shared experience. Whispers in the dark. Huddles in the lobby. Arguments on the internet. 

Critics play a crucial role in those conversations, whether by sparking them before movies come out or stoking them after they’ve been released. And while studios would obviously prefer that we help them sell tickets on a film-by-film basis, the truth is that a good critic rarely tries to dissuade people from seeing a bad movie, just as a bad critic rarely succeeds in convincing people to see a good one — it’s not our job to determine how the masses spend their money, and if it were, the success of “Michael” alone would be reason enough to nuke the entire profession from orbit. 

Our job, at least in the context of corporate Hollywood, is to affirm and uphold the credible belief that movies on the whole are worth taking seriously, even when the medium appears to have lost faith in itself. That they can be meaningful in one sense or another, and have failed us to some degree when they aren’t. That studios have a capacity to produce mass art of unmatchable power, and that audiences still have a legitimate reason to hope they might catch a glimpse of that power during a trip to their local AMC.

It may not always seem this way, but studios benefit from pans as much as they do from raves, and their efforts to bypass and/or undermine critics will only wind up hurting its own interests in the long run. Or even in the not-so-long run, for that matter. In that light, Hollywood should be doing everything it can to support critics rather than going out of its way to make life harder for the fortunate and/or demented few of us who continue to survive in this dying industry. Influencers have a real and valid place in the promotional ecosystem, but the movies can’t afford for that place to come at the expense of the people who are paid to keep them honest. Show us the films. Give us a reasonable amount of time to write about them. Allow us to help add texture and credibility to the way they’re first received by the world. Studios can only sneak their stuff past the guards at the gate so many times before ticket-buyers start to get suspicious — the Trojan horse was a great idea, but it only had to work once.