We can shit on this all we want, but the normies are going to eat this slop up.
Are they? The much vaunted rabid Nolan fanbase are not normies. They are, in essence, Snyderbros with pretensions of grandeur. They are loud and they are dedicated and will pay to see what their "last great auteur" exhibits on the largest and most expensive screens available. But there aren't that many of them in the scheme of things. You might have expected Nolan to attract a mainstream normie following with his Batman trilogy but he didn't. Dunkirk showed that he didn't and that was despite the normie-bait stunt casting of Harry Styles with all of the mainstream PR built on the back of that. His great "success" Intersteller, which also set IMAX records at the time, took $681m (original run - re-releases take it to $774m). Good numbers but far from mass market normie blockbuster numbers. Tenet has the excuse of the Kung Flu (legitimately for once) and with Oppenheimer you can't separate any Nolan factor from the wider Barbenheimer factor which was clearly a unique circumstance.
So there's no basis for believing Nolan has accrued a mass normie audience that will pay to see a film because it's a Nolan film. If anything I'd argue that the major Nolan selling point of intelligent authenticity and technical excellence (leaving aside the extent to which that was deserved) established in his earlier career has been tarnished. Intersteller was glossy gibberish. Tenet emphasised a longstanding issue with Nolan films concerning sound quality (not what you'd expect from a technically excellent director) and also had severe plot coherence/integrity issues.
Remember when we were told by a gushing press about the record breaking immediate premium large format sell out of tickets a year in advance? That was 150k tickets and $3.4m. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick but a drop in the ocean in terms of determining whether this film will succeed. Remember when about a month ago we were told by a gushing press about the record setting 24 hours presales at the BFI IMAX? That was 28k tickets and $1m. That's the effect of the loud dedicated Nolan fanbase and it's trivial in the wider scheme of things not that you'd know that from the reporting.
And the mass market of normies aren't quite the mindless cattle that they are viewed as. Nothing had more of an iron grip on the normies (and the PR machinery) than Marvell circa Endgame and all it took was a few bad films to turn the normie perception from must see to must avoid. No-one had more of a normie following than Steven Spielberg (Nolan does not come close) but his West Side Story, The Fablemans and, Disclosure Day all vanished like farts in a hurricane. The Odyssey controversies have escaped containment and entered the mainstream. Despite the "people are aware of it" / "people are talking about it" cope, when it's a general public controversy (as opposed to an industry controvery - Sound of Freedom / Citizen Vigilante), that almost never ends well.
There are only two things I'm confident about with Nolan's Odyssey. Firstly; the studio, industry and media will lie, mislead and deceive to prop it up and claim it's a success to a level never seen before. Secondly; it will take less money that it would have done without the controversies.
