Hollywood pulled out all the stops for "The Odyssey" - They relied heavily on director Christopher Nolan's built-in and generally pretentious audience to drive early box office revenues.
The hype machine was running non-stop for months before the release. The distributor's focused heavily on IMAX ticket sales, which cost more than double a normal theater ticket. They attempted to hide the woke content of the film from the public for as long as possible (an ancient Greek epic with no Greeks, featuring black, Asian, Hispanic and trans actors with a story that deconstructs the hero's journey of Odysseus, making him into a broken shell of a man. Historical inaccuracies and modernization are rampant in the movie.
Critical websites also froze the audience ratings above 95% by rejecting most negative reviews.
Despite all of this, The Odyssey's early box office was not impressive compared to most blockbuster movies. It didn't even break the top 60 movies for opening weekend revenues (adjusted for inflation). The political left rushed onto social media to declare victory, claiming that "Get Woke, Go Broke is over".
Then, Spider Man: Brand New Day opened and ate The Odyssey's lunch, showing how a real blockbuster is supposed to perform.
For its opening weekend, Spider Man raked in $927 million worldwide - Compare that to The Odyssey's $264 million global box office for the first weekend. Spider Man crushed The Odyssey without trying. Spider Man is projected to make around $2.5 billion in the next few weeks while Nolan's movie is struggling to hit $1 billion. If Nolan had made a non-woke movie, maybe he would have had better numbers.
The Odyssey's theater take sounds like a success, despite being easily surpassed by Spider Man. However, with all the bluster over the film's "woke triumph", leftists are avoiding an inconvenient truth: The Odyssey has yet to make a single penny in raw profit.
Nolan's woke translation has brought in $911 million after three weeks, but it needs around $950 million just to break even. This is accounting for marketing costs, theaters taking their 50% cut, and Nolan taking his own 20% cut of revenues as part of his contract. Will the Odyssey break even? Probably, but Universal Studios will be straining to make any meaningful profit from the production.
Nolan will be laughing all the way to the bank, but distributors will not be as fortunate. Spider Man has already surpassed the break even point and made a profit.
In the end, The Odyssey will represent nothing more than a woke vanity project for a director who is fading in talent. Nolan says he may be taking several years away from the business after Odyssey, which means Hollywood expended all its ammunition on one last stand.
The Hollywood model has long been to force progressive content on audiences while ignoring public pleas for less propaganda. In the minds of the elites, the masses must be conditioned over time to accept wokeness. They believe that if they saturate the market for long enough, movie-goers will eventually capitulate and accept woke as the new normal. This has not happened.
Instead, nearly every woke movie and streaming series has failed, losing the industry billions in cumulative production costs. Studios have been forced in the past couple of years to return to less political messaging and more classic entertainment.
The Odyssey is a defiant rebellion, specifically designed as a vehicle to revitalize the Hollywood argument in favor of woke content. Yet, compared to non-woke movies, the profit margin is looking dismal.
The political left never learns, they only double down on failure and convince themselves that their own propaganda is reality. Even if one considers The Odyssey a "success" for making it's money back, how many woke movies can Christopher Nolan possibly direct? One every few years? No other director has a similar simp audience to lean on.
Meaning, The Odyssey is likely the last gasp, the death rattle of far-left content gaining any momentum in theaters for years to come. One woke movie breaking even does not make up for hundreds of box office disasters.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 20:30Authored by Jay Rogers via RealClearDefense,
Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family's oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you'd think it was written in 2022. It wasn't. That's the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.
I've spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn't actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn't. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn't outsource the duty.
Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon's books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers' Basic Allowance for Housing flowing straight to the landlord as rent. The Pentagon would keep oversight, backed by incentive fees for good performance and penalties for bad. On paper, a clean alignment of interests. In practice, a guaranteed revenue stream with an oversight function nobody actually staffed.
Fort Stewart's housing has been run by Balfour Beatty Communities since the base was privatized. In December 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States, agreeing to pay more than $65 million in criminal fines, restitution, and a related civil settlement. The company's employees falsified maintenance records and destroyed resident comment cards between 2013 and 2019 to fraudulently collect incentive fees they hadn't earned. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the fraud was "a consequence of BBC's broken corporate culture" that put profit ahead of servicemembers' welfare.
Four months later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the conduct hadn't stopped. Its bipartisan staff report on the mistreatment of military families in privatized housing documented that Balfour's post-2019 behavior mirrored the misconduct behind its guilty plea; in the same period the company was under active federal investigation. A company can plead guilty to defrauding the government over housing conditions and keep collecting Basic Allowance for Housing checks from the families living in the homes it failed.
Fast-forward to this month. Fort Stewart is still Balfour Beatty's. Fort Benning's housing is run by a different company, the Michaels Organization's Villages of Benning. Ossoff's report found nearly identical failures at both: mold, lead, cover-ups, families told their complaints were handled when they weren't. That detail should stop anyone from treating this as one bad company. Two operators, two installations, the same pattern. The failure sits in the oversight structure, not the logo on the leasing office.
The government's own auditors have said as much. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office made 19 recommendations to improve DOD's oversight of privatized housing, including a priority recommendation that the Pentagon set clear, consistent, department-wide home inspection standards, after finding that comparable maintenance problems were getting graded differently depending on who held the clipboard. As of GAO's most recent public status update, that priority recommendation was still open, with DOD not expecting signed guidance until mid-2025 at the earliest. Congress had to legislate the fix GAO had already recommended.
This is the same structural failure I've written about previously in public pension governance, wearing a uniform instead of a suit. A pension trustee who delegates asset management to an outside manager doesn't delegate away fiduciary responsibility for the outcome; the law is explicit that the duty stays with the trustee. The Pentagon's relationship with its housing contractors works the same way as a matter of principle, even though the enforcement mechanism is a lease rather than ERISA. Both share the same defect: an incentive-fee structure that pays out on paperwork instead of results, and an oversight office too thin to catch the difference until a senator's staff does the job for it.
That fix is now in the books. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December, directs the Secretary of War to establish a standard inspection and audit program for privatized and government-owned housing using independent, qualified inspectors, and separately tightens the rules on when a housing company may close a maintenance work order. Falsified paperwork closed BBC's work orders and inflated its bonuses for six years before anyone with subpoena power looked at the underlying data; an inspector who doesn't answer to the landlord closes that loophole.
Whether the law works depends on what determines whether any oversight regime works: whether a breach costs the party responsible for it. Balfour Beatty's $65 million penalty amounted to roughly one percent of the $6 billion in military housing assets the company reported managing at the time of its plea. A one-percent toll on a six-year fraud scheme is a minor cost of doing business, not a deterrent. If the penalty barely registers against the portfolio, the next audit will look exactly like the last one. Congress wrote the inspection program. It still has to write the consequence.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 20:05