The Weekend Read | Issue No. 62

Summer Showcase Voting Is Open

Watch the contenders, open the redesigned ballot, and help decide which films go before our industry judges. Full details – and the five categories – below. Voting closes August 16.

Leave Your Homer at Home

Miles Stephenson has never been a Christopher Nolan devotee, and he’ll be the first to tell you The Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, Homer’s. So why did our chief film critic walk out more moved than he’s been by a Nolan film since Memento?

Read Receipts, Vol. 9

Christopher Nolan’s epic isn’t the only Greek myth in the box office’s top five this weekend. Read the full breakdown below.

By Ryder McNeal

Over the past few weeks, we here at PREVO HQ have been inundated by the most film submissions we’ve ever received. It hasn’t been easy to keep up, but that’s a great problem to have. And, after much deliberation, we somehow managed to whittle the field down to around thirty films competing in the Summer Showcase, and as of this issue landing in your inbox, voting is officially open, which means that you (assuming you’re a PREVO subscriber) can go cast your vote right now.

The most-voted films become nominees and go before our industry judges. The winning and nominated filmmakers are awarded various tiers of laurels (the short-film equivalent of an Oscar) and meet our industry judges. They will also participate in a variety of live-streamed shows and discussions that we’ll be hosting after voting concludes on August 16th. (Official winners are declared by our industry jury in late August – exact date TBD.)

Second best of all — behind only the incredible new films themselves — is the entirely redesigned PREVO ballot. Anyone who voted in a past PREVO competition may remember the upvote/downvote buttons that used to live beneath each film as you watched. They were, admittedly, a little ugly and — worse — sluggish. So we rebuilt it entirely, and you can see the stylish result at the link below. Once you’ve filled out your ballot, you get a shareable digital card of your picks that you can post and pass around.

Full steps for voting and taking part in the Showcase — whether you’re a filmmaker, someone voting for a friend or family member’s film, or just someone who wants to watch great films — are right below.

Elsewhere in this issue, our chief film critic Miles Stephenson takes on the movie of the summer: The Odyssey. He walked in a Nolan skeptic; where he walked out may surprise you.

And then Read Receipts, Vol. 9, closes us out, recapping a box office weekend with not one, but two Greek myths in the top five.

But before any of that — go vote. Here’s how.

1. Subscribe. Any PREVO subscriber can vote. If you’re reading this, you’re likely already in.

2. Watch the contenders. Head to the Summer Showcase Selections on the site or in the app – around 30 short films, most under 20 minutes. Watch as many as you can before you vote. (This is the fun part.)

3. Open your ballot. It’s brand-new – a redesigned, full-page ballot that walks you category by category. No more thumbs-up beneath the player.

4. Vote your five. One film per category, across all five:

Best Picture · Best Acting · Best Cinematography · Best Writing · Best Music

Vote in as many as you like – partial ballots count. But fill out all five and you’ll unlock your finished ballot: a shareable card of your picks, made to post. (Tag the filmmakers. They appreciate it.)

That’s all for now.

How to Vote

Open Your Ballot

Written by Miles Stephenson

After reading nothing but casting controversy, costume and art direction debates, and critical praise for weeks, I went to my local theater and saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I have to say: I’ve never been a Christopher Nolan devotee. None can deny his technical mastery, but the flesh and blood of his characters and stories? The emotional experience of watching them? They make me feel like some alien watching the stories of another species, how The Cyclops must’ve felt watching Odysseus and his Achaeans in the cave.

Before I tell you my verdict on The Odyssey, I’d like to give a brief overview of my feelings on Nolan’s movies. I found Interstellar — or, climate change 2001: A Space Odyssey — too self-serious for a movie with a dime-novel sci-fi plot. In Tenet and his other logic puzzle films, I felt as if they tried to plaster over surface-level characters with mind-bending “4D chess” tricks. Worse still, I felt as if many were directed by a committee; they have wide international appeal but not a specific sense of perspective. They are not grounded in a particular human moment or culture in the way Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Tarkovsky’s Solaris might be. I always felt Nolan could benefit from adding more anthropology to his toolbox. How do people actually talk? What do his characters think about when they go home at night? What culture are we looking at? Who are these people? What do they value? Memento gets closest to answering these questions and for that reason it’s a stand-out to me, his highest achievement alongside The Prestige.

I enjoyed his Batman films for being Heat-inspired noir crime thrillers that happen to feature a superhero instead of “superhero movies,” but they’re still not my ideal type of movie. And finally I found Oppenheimer to be an elegantly shot and scored music video on nuclear existentialism but again, while my eyes and ears were thrilled, my heart was never stirred. That’s why it was perhaps surprising that I went into The Odyssey expecting disappointment yet came away thoroughly entertained.

Like the best of the mid-2000s action adventure movies, The Odyssey enthralls you with a likable and magnanimous hero right from the get-go: Matt Damon. His performance to me sells the movie emotionally. Is it Homer’s Odyssey? Certainly not. Nolan takes the prideful, cunning, and mischievous Homeric Odysseus (the archetypal Greek hero) and turns him into a solemn PTSD-ridden war veteran filled with regret about the devastation of The Trojan War. And yet, this new character, this Achaean Matt Damon, is quite compelling!

Nolan said that the Bronze Age moral universe of the original story is too alien for modern viewers; so he infused it with Christian morality. To be sure, something is lost in this transfusion. The reason so many find The Odyssey and The Iliad to be fascinating windows into another culture is precisely because they show the very pagan values of Mycenaean civilization, a time when ancient Greeks valued strength, glory, and beauty over all else in what Nietzsche dubbed master morality. Before The Bible told us to revere the sick, the poor, and the downxtrodden, Homer exalted Achilles as the peak figure of human achievement, a god among men who Homer introduces to us in a moment of rage as his war prize, a living woman named Briseis, is taken away from him. This is a prideful, wrathful man who takes what he wants and kills hundreds of people. Yet to the Bronze Age Greeks, he’s a hero. These are the values of Archaic Greece.

Nolan finds this master morality of The Odyssey and The Iliad too dangerous or alienating for us moderns. Nolan said, “Talking about choices of adaptation, the end of the poem is so grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material.” Nolan’s solution is to cut it off at the knees and inject what Nietzsche would call “slave morality” into Homer’s story; Odysseus and his Achaean comrades are evil becausethey were cunning and strong enough to win the Trojan War. In Homer, Odysseus’ mētis (or cunning intelligence) is admired. Success through this (including ruses) brings him kleos (or glory) just as battlefield prowess does. There is no moral rejection of deception in warfare in Homer. But Nolan wants his hero, Matt Damon, to be likeable. He’s a wife guy. He’s a selfless hero who puts himself at risk to save his own men. He’s so cool and legendary among the Achaeans that even the villain of the movie, a wonderfully smarmy Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous, has to sing his praise when he’s first introduced.

Perhaps I’m becoming more open-minded with age but despite my admiration for Homer and for Greek history, I wasn’t bothered by Nolan’s changes. To me, it’s just an entirely different story, and I like the new direction Nolan, Damon, and Pattinson take with it. Classicists should steer clear, but moviegoers wanting an entertaining action adventure film will be satisfied. And it has more to offer than just cheap thrills; Nolan captures a real sense of yearning and melancholy with Damon’s hero. It’s the most emotionally invested I’ve been in a Christopher Nolan movie since Memento. So my message to Nolan skeptics and fans alike is this: leave your copy of Homer at home but go see The Odyssey.

Weekend of July 24-26th, 2026

• #1: The Odyssey just posted the best second weekend of Christopher Nolan’s career. Universal’s $250 million Homer adaptation dropped only about 30% to an estimated $87 million – a second-weekend record for Nolan, past The Dark Knight, and one of the best sophomore holds an R-rated film has ever had, behind only Deadpool & Wolverine. It set 2026’s best-ever Monday ($18.7 million) on the way there, stands near $286 million domestic and $425 million-plus worldwide after ten days, and is now tracking to become the year’s third film past $1 billion.

• #2–4: the family titles are running out of road. Moana held second (~$10.5 million) but is a $250 million remake that won’t clear $150 million domestic. Toy Story 5 (~$10 million) posted its softest drop yet and is about to become 2026’s third billion-dollar movie. Minions & Monsters (~$9.6 million) crossed $155 million domestic. All three are winding down in an orderly line.

• Hadestown crashed the top five. Bleecker Street’s filmed capture of the Tony-winning Broadway musical – shot in London’s West End, released as a five-night “event” – opened to an estimated $9.7 million from 1,949 screens, the second-biggest opening for a live-stage capture ever, behind only Hamilton. Demand was strong enough that the distributor extended the run mid-release.

• The macro: the summer crossed $3 billion this weekend, running about 10% ahead of last year, and exhibitors are now openly talking about 2026 becoming the first $10-billion domestic year since before the pandemic.Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings in next week; until then, the box office belongs to Odysseus.