r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 r/movies Contributor • 4h ago

Article ‘The Odyssey’ Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way | This year's breakouts like 'Project Hail Mary' and 'Obsession' were made by filmmakers who sweated. While CG-stuffed franchise disappointments such as 'Supergirl,' 'Moana,' and 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' looked lazy.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/odyssey-box-office-2026-practical-effects-1236652219/
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u/iamadragan 4h ago

I really didn't see what all the fuss was about with the hate for that movie. It was a fun star wars movie that was admittedly cheesy at times but so are all star wars movies

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u/Posty_Baloney 3h ago

Its mostly because Star Wars used to be a huge event, but with how much they've been churning out (and how much of it was pretty mediocre), this movie was just kind of whatever. A season of TV edited to be feature length and it was just okay. Yeah, most of the movies range from okay to down-right terrible, but it used to invoke a certain magic in both kids and adults thats just gone now.

Like, the first Star Wars movie in 7 years should have been a HUGE deal, instead it was more like "oh. More star wars. Cool. Maybe ill check it out if I have time".

Hate might be a strong word, I think it's more a collective sense of apathy for the state of the franchise.

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u/literated 3h ago

As someone who's never seen the show, I expected it be a lot more of a space western than it actually turned out to be.

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u/tombrady011235 3h ago

Cheesy is a feature not a bug in Star Wars

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u/Efficient-Memory7105 3h ago

People seem to be forgetting the fact that the first movie was basically "Vietcong Space Wizards blow up a massive genocide machine called the 'Death Star'".

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u/mateushkush 3h ago

And you seem to forget that the first movie is very entertaining and pretty much a perfect blockbuster while the new one is a couple of middling tv episodes strung together with tension resetting between every chapter.

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u/C0rona 3h ago

And you seem to forget that enjoyment of any given piece of media is deeply subjective. If you don't find newer Star Wars entertaining, that's fine but many people do.

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u/mateushkush 3h ago

And you seem to forget… wait I said that, and you have the point, one can dislike the new Mandalorian despite remembering perfectly well the original Star Wars and without being terribly unfair. That’s why I answered op, so thanks.

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u/C0rona 2h ago

Glad to see we're in agreement here. One can enjoy any Star Wars movie, despite their flaws.

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u/Lenniiz 2h ago

Where were those many people when the film was in theaters?

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u/C0rona 1h ago

I suspect many did what I did and waited for it to come to streaming.

Box office success also has no bearing on whether a movie is enjoyable. Scott Pilgrim was famously a total flop but it's among my favorite movies of all time and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

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u/gairloch0777 2h ago

I assume in the theatre given it made back it's budget and marketing while also likely to go on and drive more people to pick up disney+

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u/Daxx22 2h ago

Waiting on streaming, mostly. Not all of us have a spare $100+ to take the family to a theater nowadays.

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u/Hobbitsliketoparty 3h ago

What's that have to do with being cheesey? The OG trilogy had significantly mored depth than any of the newer films. Dumbing it down to fit your narrative doesn't negate that.

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u/literated 3h ago

The cheesyness didn't bother me but a lot of the backgrounds/surroundings did look pretty lazy and forgettable. Yes, the puppets were nice and the movie had some interesting stop-motion effects but that didn't outweigh the rest of it. I don't know if that's what they did but it looked like they relied on The Volume a whole lot. There's so many times where you get a shot that looks like it's in an open space or some big area but then they only utilize a tiny focused speck of it and never actually interact with anything outside of that small perimeter.

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u/Hufa123 3h ago

Agreed. It was a fun adventure, and not much more than that, but it wasn't less than that either. Sure, I'd preferred to see some more thematic development in it, but I still enjoyed it. And that's the important part.

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u/littlebrwnrobot 4h ago

Fr it was fine, I enjoyed it

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u/jordanmc7 3h ago

Star Wars practically invented the blockbuster; so “it was fine” is a big step down. Although yes, I agree, it was fine.

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u/docnig 3h ago

Doesn’t that credit go more to jaws?

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u/jordanmc7 3h ago

That’s why I threw the “practically” in there; although I think Star Wars is a little more characteristic of a blockbuster film, Jaws was first and set the precedent.

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u/docnig 3h ago

Fair enough

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u/RyanB_ 3h ago

Back in the day, sure. Compared to most every film since the OT, definitely a step up

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u/Chemistry11 3h ago

My interest in Star Wars has been long dead. I thought maybe I had some affinity left as I liked the show’s first season, mostly (and legit the last thing I enjoyed from SW) so I gave the movie a shot.

It just all felt so soulless to me.

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u/RenRen512 1h ago

Right? I started watching it last night and I just couldn't be bothered. It felt empty and like going through the motions. Turned it off about a third of the way through.

I'll watch it eventually, but I'll have to be in the proper mood.

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u/loganalbertuhh 3h ago

I can speak for myself here. Maybe this covers some fans. It's not bc of the movie itself. I didn't go see it more due to the apathy Disney has brought on me by all the consistently low quality star wars movies and shows they've made.

Imagine in 2015, before VII came out, if they'd announced that there would be a Star Wars anything tv show. The pilot, the first season, would both be more hyped than Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, anything back then. Almost like Mando was, before they tried to give him the MCU treatment and make season 2.5.

And now, we have all these star wars things coming out all the time, and nobody cares. It's saturation sure, but I think it's also because so much of it is aimless and just not great. 

I'm disappointed that I don't care anymore. I'd love to care, I wanna be excited about star wars but I'm not. So when I see a TV show turned movie with trailers that look like the show, nothing special, it grates me. 

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u/learnedsanity 3h ago

It came from a fun western centered Star Wars show and become generic Star Wars aka Grogu and friends.

I am sure people liked it but it wasn't for me and I am sure others felt the same.

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u/Phormicidae 3h ago

The hate surrounding it was overblown. I don't think that many people hated it. I think it was really due to expectations: If I, an amateur chef who tries his best, made you my homemade pasta with bolognese, you might be surprised on how good it is (if I do say so myself.) But if Massimo Bottura made my bolognese, you probably would have expected more.

Fans wanted this big epic story with galactic impact and huge revelations. What we got was a pretty good episode of a TV show.

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u/notbad4human 3h ago

It just wasn’t special. People are sick of phoning in Star Wars content. I saw it opening weekend and I can barely tell you what happened in the movie

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u/kodman7 3h ago

Didn't feel like a movie, felt like an extra long episode of the show

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u/Yosho2k 3h ago

I had a lot of fun watching it, and Rotta the Hutt, the character reddit was REALLY angry about from the trailers was the best part of the movie. The makers of Mandalorian/Grogu knew what their assignment was and they did a great job.

It didn't deserve to fall off the way it did, but maybe the movie coming out 3-4 years after the series had dropped off wasn't the best business decision.

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u/metnavman2 3h ago

It's fell off because it was boring. I turned it off halfway through because its formulaic, predictable, and an overall insulting cash grab. It should've come out 4 years ago to capitalize on the hype of those characters. It did nothing new, pushed no new ideas, and was incredibly safe. Its Disney+ kids stuff. Which is fine for what it is, but doesn't drive half a billion or more ticket sales.

Its a higher production value series of TV episodes for a show thats already done 3 seasons and largely annoyed fans with the direction it took and the convoluted spin-offs it made. The hype has been spent. Releasing this in theaters was a 100M dollar mistake, and it shows. /shrug

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u/Yosho2k 3h ago

👍

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u/GoldshireEnjoyer 3h ago

I just don’t get why they cast Jeremy Allen White for it if they were going to alter his voice so much. I had no idea he was in the film until the credits.

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u/Yosho2k 3h ago

Martin Scorsese was in the movie too.

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u/SheerAwesomness 3h ago

I rarely actively dislike a movie and i did not like this one bit EXCEPT for the puppets, those parts were a joy.

The voice acting was abysmal, Sigourney Weaver was sleep walking through it, the enemies are all just gray blobs with no weight, no stakes, and very ugly character and set design. Again, BESIDES the puppets, which rocked and rolled. I wouldn’t have been bothered by the episodic nature if it didn’t feel like getting a weight dropped on my chest realizing there was an HOUR LEFT after they got Ratta on the team.

Those could all be discarded as taste nitpicks, but my biggest gripe with this is the same as Supergirl, and why I think these films are failing in comparison to their budgets and franchise power, which I hope is not a trend in PG-13 family adventure flicks:
The tone makes no sense. Why is Mando viscerally headshotting and breaking the limbs of storm troopers, men screaming in agony, really adult violence just without blood, while the dialogue and narrative structure is built for 5 year olds. The Mandalorian show was consistent with its tone; when it was light it was earned, but the gravity of the situations matched the action matched the story flow, we had a consistent, well written tone.
Supergirl too, to aid what i’m saying, has a child’s throat slit on screen by pirates who are enslaving young girls, but wants to run a script with characters that are so simplistic that I understood 100% of what was said when I accidentally saw it in full German while I was abroad.

The tonal whiplash induced by truly dogshit bullshit writing is off putting. The rest of it is lazy and bad, but these issues are why I believe we have so many stories of theater audiences shifting their viewing trends.

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u/literated 3h ago

adult violence just without blood

That part really stood out to me. You can have violence but not a drop of blood. And preferably your main character fights some robots or some strange alien creatures to begin with. It felt really weird with how prevalent that was.

the enemies are all just gray blobs with no weight, no stakes, and very ugly character and set design

Both The Mandalorian and Grogu and Supergirl felt like that to me. So much of it is just... generic and inconsequential.

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u/Russeru21 1h ago

Sometimes I feel a bit crazy with how few people seemed to care that the writing and dialogue was absolutely abysmal. It was so generic and soulless that it feels like an LLM trained on the scripts from Mando episodes wrote it. 

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u/SheerAwesomness 1h ago

Like i get it, it’s designed to be consumed while people are one 1-2 other screens. I can’t even be mad about that when that’s just how people relax now, the numbers show it to be true.

And that’s why I use the word consume not watch. It’s not worth watching, it wasn’t designed to be. And I don’t see any reason to respect that even though I understand it.

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u/The_Afro_King98 3h ago

I think people are just burnt out on star wars. Doesn't help that the recent shows and movies have an inconsistent quality, some are bangers and some are meh

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u/Sprintzer 3h ago

Burnt out on Star Wars, weak movie title, assumed excessive use of CGI, and the trailer was weak. I don’t know if I could place what was “wrong” with the way the movie looked in the trailer, but it just looked like it wasn’t movie-worthy or something.

I personally did not see it for some of these reasons; I’ll admit it’s wrong for everyone to judge it without seeing it. I also had only seeing a season or two of the show and there are loads of people who are in a similar position

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u/BattledroidE 3h ago

It's a perfectly ok movie. Fun, easily digestible. But I don't get anything more from it.

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u/MJOLNIRdragoon 3h ago

It would have been a great season opener, but it didn't really merit a theatrical release. That's my only thought. It was a good, 2 hour long episode of Mandalorian.

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u/Cool-Contribution-68 2h ago

I loved the puppets!

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u/King_Chochacho 2h ago

For me it's just offputting the way Disney is just transparently milking the franchise. 7 animated series, 7 live action series, 6 movies since they took over. And TBH the overall quality has been pretty impressive, but it somehow still feels like a cash grab. Same with Marvel.

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u/dnapol5280 2h ago

Tbh I've got two little kids I can't be taking to Mando and Grogu, and despite wanting to see it, it hasn't risen up to be worth getting a babysitter for - while I will for The Odyssey.

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u/kiwigate 2h ago

It's bad. It's so bad people assumed it was a poor attempt to elevate a season of TV.

Then we learned it was exactly that. The criticism was validated by the facts. Idk why anyone would struggle against it when, for a rare occasion, we have clear evidence that cannot be dismissed as subjectivity.

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u/mythrilcrafter 2h ago

That's exactly how I feel about the Han Solo movie.

It was a goofy fun universe-filler movie that shows what the non-lightsaber wielding members of the Start Wars universe gets up to; if anything it's a great space pirate movie.

Sometimes I wonder if the biggest critics of Start Wars films are the "Mr Director, can you explain why the patina on C3PO's body panels don't properly reflect the passage of time that is supposed to connect A New Hope to Empire Strikes Back?" type of people.

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u/iamadragan 1h ago

Lol yeah I think people are definitely overly critical. Mostly because of their attachment.

And yeah I agree that they are conditioned to expect a grand scale, universe altering plot from a star wars movie so anything at a lower scale just doesn't seem as important.

Idk, both solo and the mandalorian might not be life altering movies but they're enjoyable and don't feel out of place in the universe.

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u/Fantastic_Snow_9633 1h ago

It was a "movie" that felt more like two 2-hour episodes that could've premiered on Disney+ instead.

Not every movie necessary needs to have a "Big Bad" or have some pure evil plan that the good guy has to stop, but M&G just felt like smaller plot points in a larger story.

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u/dougan25 15m ago

It was decently well received outside the internet

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u/rsplatpc 3h ago

It’s was just mid, I didn’t really care what happened and for me that’s the worst type of movie, I’d rather watch something that was like “MAN that was bad!” vs something where I can’t remember a thing about it because it was so bland

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u/LuinAelin 3h ago

Yeah. I can see it doing well on D plus where the characters originate and by the end of the year people will be asking why they slept on it.