'The Odyssey' Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way

randycupertino

In addition to CG fatigue I think users are having remake fatigue. Audiences don't want to see a Moana remake, another Marvel movie or another Superman spin-off. Star Wars and Marvel are getting so overexposed people aren't bothering to show up for them to theaters.

xyzsparetimexyz

No, everyone just watches Nolan movies because he's seen as a director who can do no wrong. It says nothing about CGI.

qarl2

Is that really the take away? I think the real take away is that audiences want good movies. The Odyssey is a good movie - it just so happens to be made the hard way. (Or, in other words, correlation does not imply causation, and that's all this article has.)

Diogenesian

Just to be clear, the top grossing movie so far this year: Super Mario Galaxy. And #3: Toy Story 5 In 2025 all the top 10 films were either 3D animation or CGI-heavy action, with one exception: F1 used a lot of practical effects. Maybe the problem with Moana and Mandalorian is that even lazy uninformed movie-goers recognized an empty cash-grab when they saw the trailer.

altairprime

There’s a clear thread of human effort and presence from The Muppets to Space Jam to Dune that this Odyssey movie’s creators understood. People want Amelié, not Avengers. It’s fine to use so much CGI that your film can’t be re-exported in 4K (yes, that’s why) so long as you have people wearing stuff and standing in front of other stuff. It’s not fine to film your entire movie with mocap bodysuits on green backgrounds and having them perform to a tennis ball as co-actor that will be AI-generated from a dead actor later. I probably won’t watch the Odyssey but I will absolutely celebrate this aspect of it to others now that I know.

buster

It's one of the greatest stories of all time directed by Nolan. CGI or not, whatever.

pjmlp

What we want are good movies, not fast food entertainment.

Fr0styMatt88

On the specific no/low-CGI bent — I find the obsession with using this (mostly false) claim so utterly disrespectful to the people in VFX that have poured thousands upon thousands of hours of their lives into the craft, only to be actively derided (or outright denied) by producers hoping to capitalise on whatever this weird obsession is. For anyone that hasn’t seen it but is interested in the topic, this series is HIGHLY worth a watch: “NO CGI” is really just INVISIBLE CGI - 1 https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo

oliyoung

WE. JUST. WANT. GOOD. STORIES. WELL. TOLD.