The Odyssey’s Record Rotten Tomatoes Audience Review Score Has Solidified

The Odyssey has surpassed all box office expectations, already earning $263 million worldwide after its first weekend on a reported $250 million budget. That haul is a record for Christopher Nolan’s films, but the film has achieved additional milestones as well.

The Odyssey’s Rotten Tomatoes audience review score has solidified, alongside the critic score. Over 400 critics have given The Odyssey a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, while audience scores are even higher, now at a 97%. Often when more reviews come in over time, that number can drop. Here, the film has maintained this record level. Record for what?

Among the wide releases of 2026, The Odyssey’s 97% score puts it above The Sheep Detectives (96%), Project Hail Mary (95%) and Obsession (94%).

As said, The Odyssey’s scores are also a record for Christopher Nolan himself, who has never directed a critic- or audience-deemed “rotten” feature. The 97% of The Odyssey is above The Dark Knight (94%), Memento (94%), and Oppenheimer (91%). Oppenheimer, of course, won Best Picture in 2024 and nabbed Nolan Best Director. Needless to say, there is plenty of awards buzz about The Odyssey.

Much fuss has been made online about these audience scores by a segment of the population who believe The Odyssey was destined to fail, and something sinister must be going on behind the scenes to produce these numbers. A viral post has inspected the data of the Rotten Tomatoes page to find the “actual” audience score is a 56%.

However, this is due to a system Rotten Tomatoes has put in place to prevent review bombing, aka being able to score a movie with no proof the poster has actually seen it. The site shifted to a model that links Fandango ticket purchases to being able to score the film as a “verified” viewer. That lower number includes “normal” reviews that do not have any sort of verification, similar to what we see on an (also frequently-cited) site like Metacritic, where the film has a 5.1/10 user rating. No verification needed there. But even on a site like IMDB, which has no ticket-linking, The Odyssey still has an 8.4/10, despite 10% of its reviews being a 1/10.

A common refrain has been that scores, audience or critic, don’t matter in the end. The all-important figure is simply box office, and if those reviews don’t translate into people showing up to watch the film, that means nothing. Well, they are, and with The Odyssey outpacing Oppenheimer, it is easily possible it may top a billion at the box office, behind only Nolan’s last two Batman features. Or perhaps, depending on how things go, not behind them at all…

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.