Tom Cruise new movie talk is one thing; Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the film now posting the numbers. The movie has reached a 97% Popcornmeter audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest of Nolan’s career, and that figure was updated Friday afternoon after the film opened nationwide.
Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and Robert Pattinson as Antinous. The rating is based on 1,000-plus verified user reviews, which gives the score enough volume to matter as an early audience signal rather than a tiny burst of reaction.
96% critics, 97% audience
The split is the clearest complication in the data. The Odyssey held a 96% fresh critics’ score on Wednesday from 145 reviews, then kept a 96% fresh score on the Tomatometer as the review count rose to 337, while the audience score climbed to 97% on Friday afternoon.
That gap matters because the audience side is now outpacing the critic side, even though the movie is already sitting near the top of both measures. For Nolan, that is the business story: the film is not just reviewing well with professionals, it is converting verified user ratings into the strongest audience reception of his filmography.
Nolan’s Popcornmeter record
Rotten Tomatoes has ranked every one of Nolan’s films since Following in 1998, and none of them have been deemed rotten on the Popcornmeter. Even so, The Odyssey is now above Memento, The Dark Knight, and Batman Begins at 94%, ahead of The Prestige at 92%, and ahead of Inception and Oppenheimer at 91%.
Oppenheimer reached 91% on the Popcornmeter based on 10,000-plus verified user ratings, so The Odyssey’s 97% sits on a smaller sample for now. That makes the current lead impressive but still live; more verified ratings can move the figure, and the film has only just entered the market after Thursday previews and a Friday nationwide launch.
What Friday changed
Friday changed the comparison point for Nolan’s new release. Once the movie reached theaters, the audience score became the cleanest early read on whether viewers are matching the critical response, and the current answer is yes, by a wide margin.
For readers tracking the film as a business event, the takeaway is simple: the audience metric is currently the headline, not the critic score, and Matt Damon’s Odysseus is carrying Nolan’s strongest Rotten Tomatoes audience result yet.
