The Odyssey Leak Makes an Epic Voyage Across X

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey may be dominating cinemas, but for a few chaotic hours this weekend, it was also apparently available to watch in full on X.

A high-quality pirated copy of the near-three-hour epic was uploaded to the platform before being removed, although not before a separate post drawing attention to it attracted more than three million views. The account hosting the film was eventually suspended, but by then the leaked version had already completed a fairly remarkable digital voyage of its own.

Universal said it acted immediately after becoming aware of the unauthorised upload, initiating takedown procedures and promising to pursue the appropriate remedies to protect its copyright and intellectual property.

The leak does not appear to have inflicted any meaningful damage on the film’s commercial performance. The Odyssey has now reportedly sailed beyond $640 million at the worldwide box office, adding an impressive $87 million in the US during its second weekend. That represented a drop of just 30% from its opening, suggesting audiences still believe a Christopher Nolan spectacle is best experienced on the biggest screen possible, rather than compressed into a social media video player.

The controversy also carries an additional layer of awkwardness given X owner Elon Musk’s public criticism of Nolan’s casting decisions. Musk recently suggested he would use his Grok Imagine AI platform to create what he called a more “historically accurate” adaptation of Homer’s poem.

Nolan, unsurprisingly, has remained fairly relaxed about the noise, arguing that debates taking place before people have actually watched a film are largely irrelevant.

Piracy is hardly new, but uploading one of the year’s biggest movies directly onto a major social platform feels like a particularly modern twist. Odysseus faced monsters, gods and shipwrecks. Nolan’s latest challenge appears to be getting his film safely past the X algorithm.