"In 2026 A.D., going to the movies is no simple trip."

Teddy Kim reviews The Odyssey. 🐎

Good afternoon, everyone.

Today’s newsletter includes: Teddy Kim on the flaws of The Odyssey, catching up with C.O. Bigelow’s pharmacist on the dangers of peptides, an update on the operator of The 21 Club, Rockefeller Center gets a luxury hotel, a media merch trend, Travis Kalanick’s new company, and The Cut has a new fashion editor.

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⚠️⚠️⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️⚠️⚠️

The Prestige of The Odyssey. By Teddy Kim.

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

In 2026 A.D., going to the movies is no simple trip.

In this day and era, it’s an intentional choice, a rejection of scrolling the endless sea of short-form videos that waylay our lives at every turn, threatening to eat up hours, and days, adding years before we finally arrive at the place we first set out for.

Technology is changing, and the times and customs are changing with it. The streaming war has been raging on for over a decade. There are fearful rumors of raiders from far-off lands, pillaging studios as they go, under the name of consolidation, in brazen defiance of antitrust law: Treat every company as if they could be a monopoly in disguise.

So we find solace together in the darkness of the palatial theater, feasting on buttery popcorn with our seatmates, spellbound by the light of the IMAX screen. For almost three hours, we can experience “a time of apparent magic.”

Given the precarious cultural and economic health of cinema, there is an impulse to treat every movie we watch not just as an opportunity to entertain ourselves but as a way to support an industry and art form at risk. Going to watch The Odyssey, then, is just as much about celebrating and shoring up The Movies™ as seeing the film itself. And in this moment, Nolan himself, maybe along with Denis Villeneuve and Tom Cruise, has become one of the most important avatars of The Movies™ that we can all rally around as a cultural movement, an identity.

“The beats in the second half feel more cursory, like Nolan is checking off his Odyssey checklist: the Laestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the cattle of Helios, next.”

Just think about how much of the marketing for this movie has been based on a behind-the-scenes appreciation for its craft and technology. It’s the first movie to be filmed entirely on IMAX 70mm and tickets to see it in that native format have been notoriously hard to buy. New screenings at the big screen at AMC Lincoln Square are sold out deep into August and tickets are reselling for hundreds of dollars. There’s always been a premium to seeing the year’s big movies there but never in my life have I seen a movie open like a Supreme drop.