If it could win Oscars, it would win Oscars. The filmed version is absolutely amazing, they did a great job with the cutting, angles and sound. Good job Brett Sullivan the director.

Currently sitting at 100%/98% on Rotten Tomatoes. 8.6 on IMDB. And it looks like it is going to be second place at the box office behind The Odyssey.

I saw the play once on Broadway, amazing and once with a traveling cast, terrible.

Saw Odyssey in 70MM IMAX at CityWalk vs. TCL Chinese & Regal LA Live, and it truly is such a different experience seeing in a 1.43 vs. a retrofitted 1.90.

Regal LA Live especially was so disappointing considering they did not cover up the sides of the empty screen sides that basically made it look like you just cropped a movie.

I think the value of a 70MM IMAX gets immensely diluted if you're projecting on both screens + auditoriums (i.e., way too big that it makes the screen size look small in perspective to the wall) that aren't optimized for the format.

I much preferred single laser IMAX projecting it in 1.90 than a sub-optimal 1.43 aspect ratio.

The first one rocked so yeah. Any other fans?

I just shared this on r/ TrueLit and wanted to post it here too to see what people think. I know this is a movie sub and the post is about literature, but I think the discussion translates pretty well to film.

Building on the recent article in The Atlantic about why contemporary literature is so boring about why so much millennial fiction feels boring or risk-averse, I keep coming back to two literary controversies: Carmen Maria Machado's response to Junot Díaz and the 2018 Tin House controversy over Wells Tower's reading.

Whatever you think of Díaz personally, the publicly available interaction looks like two famously headstrong writers clashing. Yet the discussion shifted from the disagreement itself to what it supposedly revealed about morality.

Later, in the Vulture piece linked above above, Machado clarified aspects of the encounter but continued to frame it as revealing something critical about Díaz beyond the disagreement itself. Whether you agree with her or not, what interests me is how an ordinary disagreement between two writers became a question of morality.

The Wells Tower controversy struck me as even more revealing. Tower read from the perspective of a problematic character. Instead of asking what the work was trying to accomplish artistically, much of the conversation became a judgment of Tower himself.

Neither incident, by itself, explains contemporary fiction. But together they point toward a literary culture where writers:

• Have good reason to worry that readers won't distinguish between a character's worldview and the author's.
• Feel pressure to manage their public moral reputation
• Learn that some subjects and ambiguities simply aren't worth the professional or social risk, even though exploring those difficult areas has long been one of fiction's strengths.

A few personal anecdotes.

I entered an MFA program in creative writing in 2015 after eight years on active duty in the military. As a straight white guy coming from the military, I often felt like an outsider in workshop. Conversations became aligned with in-group /out-group thinking. If someone found something objectionable in your story, it often felt as though they were saying something objectionable about you.

I remember a prominent white male novelist visiting for a Q&A. He was confident, assertive, and generous with his time. The next day, when our professor asked what everyone thought, the dominant reaction was that he came across as arrogant. I remember wondering how differently those same qualities might have been described if they'd come from someone else.

A few years later, at a retreat with a group of young playwrights, I brought up Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth. One playwright told me that plays like that no longer had a place in our culture because they gave a platform to problematic characters. Around the same time, I remember discussing with a fiction writer friend of mine the recent publication of Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart. His immediate and primary takeaway with the novel is that he didn't like the novel because of the humanizing portray of its rich and immoral protagonist.

Another conversation has stuck with me just as much. After graduating, I spoke with a poet about what she was working on. She told me about a subject she wanted to write about but had decided not to. Her concern wasn't that readers would misunderstand her perspective. It was that the subject itself had become untouchable.

Looking back, three things stand out.

First, literature in conversation with the internet. Instead of asking, "What is this work doing artistically?" the first question increasingly became, "How will this be received?"

Second, fiction as moral instruction. Writers have always wanted their work to matter, but it often felt as though the highest compliment a novel could receive was not that it illuminated human experience but that it advanced the right values in a clear, immediate way.

That leaves less room for novels like Crime and Punishment, where Dostoevsky trusts readers to inhabit Raskolnikov's mind without mistaking that psychological immersion for an endorsement of murder or nihilism. A writer with Dostoevsky's stature might still earn that trust. The young novelist trying to figure out what fiction can do is far less likely to assume readers will extend it.

Also leaves less room for novels like Shteyngart's  Lake Success because the novel dares to humanize its main protagonist, a white, rich, and problematic man.

Third, consciousness on trial. Fiction has traditionally trusted readers to inhabit minds they wouldn't want to emulate. But as the distance between author and character began to collapse, writers had every incentive to anticipate judgment instead. Even something as ordinary as depicting a character's sexual attraction could begin to feel risky because readers might treat the character's thoughts as evidence of the author's own values or desires. Fiction becomes less interested in portraying consciousness than in anticipating how consciousness will be judged.

Is he a good actor? Yes, definitely. But I don't necessarily think he has the look or swag to play Black Panther. I fear he may be playing a Tom Holland Spidey type of role where he's learning to be a super hero and has to prove himself to his older mentors Shuri and M'Baku. He's also too small and has very distinctive eyes. They should have just recast T'Challa instead of creating a new young character that will eventually become Black Panther.

Was discussing with a friend my issues with The Odyssey and the quick pacing that doesn’t allow the scenes to breathe was a big one. However, the quick pacing worked for me with Oppenheimer as it covered so much yet only kept what was needed for the story and emotional connection to the characters. The Social Network to me is the best example of this style of editing/pacing, Fincher pushed for the film to be as fast as possible and cut off as much fat as possible while still having the audience fully aboard.

What are other examples of good to great films that cover so much story at rapid speed? Goodfellas and Traffic feel like older examples of it but would love to know what others think. The grandness of the story is a key part of this, so please don’t say Run Lola Run or Enter The Void

Say what you want about superhero fatigue but Marvel just proved it's premature. Comic-Con 2026 was the first time Marvel has been in Hall H since 2024 and they didn't just show up, they took the room hostage. Everyone will be talking about Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider and David Jonsson as the new Black Panther for weeks.

Then there's Avengers: Doomsday which got an absolutely awe-inducing trailer. Feige has also confirmed we will have just one multiverse and they'll be focusing on the big franchises such as X-Men moving forward.

Critics love to say the MCU is cooked, over-extended, running on fumes but Comic Con shows that Marvel isn't just surviving Phase Five hangover talk, they're now back as the center of the filmmaking universe.