Fans Are Fighting 'The Odyssey' Pirates on X With Rick Astley and Fake Uploads

Online piracy rarely gets funnier than this, even when the stakes run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey became the target of a brazen leak over the weekend after a high-quality bootleg surfaced on X. The unauthorized copy racked up over 2.1 million views in roughly two and a half hours before the platform pulled it down. A second, lower-quality version appeared on Sunday and collected nearly 50,000 views before it, too, was removed. Universal Pictures moved quickly. In a statement provided to Variety, the studio wrote, "We became aware of the unauthorized posting of the film and immediately initiated takedown protocols. We take copyright infringement seriously and will pursue all appropriate remedies to protect our content and intellectual property rights."

But here is where the story takes a turn nobody at Universal could have scripted.

By July 26, most remaining clones of the bootleg had been flooded out by mislabeled files promising The Odyssey but actually delivering a Rickroll. The prank involved merging two videos to mislead viewers. Some clips opened with the production company's official logo from The Odyssey, then quickly cut to Rick Astley's 1987 hit. Confusion spread across X as users hunting for the pirated film kept landing on the bait. Multiple accounts posted fake links that redirected to the music video. Call it grassroots copyright enforcement through shitposting. Nolan probably did not have this in his distribution plan.

The leak arrives in the middle of a separate, more serious conversation about who actually gets to see this movie properly. The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on 70mm IMAX film using newly designed camera technology. Yet only 41 cinemas worldwide can project the 70mm print, and tickets for standard digital IMAX showings run roughly double the price of a regular seat. More than half of those 70mm theaters sit in the United States. India, home to around 1.5 billion people, has zero.

Indian journalist Harsh Tiwari argued in The Print that "creating a film in a format that most people can never experience as intended is not how an auteur of world cinema should work." Because Nolan optimized for the larger IMAX screens, the vast majority of viewers at regular cinemas see a cropped adaptation of his intended image. TikTok and Instagram have filled with sarcastic posts of people watching on phone screens, captioned with variations of "as Nolan intended." The format gap has given the piracy story a sharper, less comfortable edge.

None of it seems to be hurting the box office. The Odyssey held firm in its second weekend with $87 million in North American ticket sales, a mere 30% drop from its debut. Globally, the film opened to $264.1 million, eclipsing The Dark Knight Rises to become Nolan's biggest worldwide launch. Within its first ten days, it closed in on $640 million at the worldwide box office against a reported $270 million production budget. 25 U.S. theaters equipped for IMAX 70mm projections drew cinephiles from hundreds of miles away. One Missouri family drove roughly 900 miles round trip from St. Louis to Grand Rapids, Michigan, just to catch a screening in the intended format.

Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak's head of marketplace trends, framed the moment plainly: "Nolan's latest epic has arrived at the perfect time, reminding everyone of the undeniable allure of the big-screen moviegoing experience."

That allure, though, is not equally distributed. The Rickroll counter-offensive is funny, genuinely so. It's also a weird mirror for the larger frustration. When millions cannot see a film in its proper format, and a pirated copy fills a phone screen in two hours, the comedy and the critique land in the same place. Nolan built The Odyssey for the biggest screens on earth. The internet, as it usually does, found a way to make that both a triumph and a punchline.

IMAX added 11 new 70mm theaters globally ahead of release. CEO Richard Gelfond has indicated that 70mm screenings will run for months. Whether that long tail can answer the access question remains a separate journey entirely.