On the day of its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, at one of the few remaining cinemas in the northeast equipped to screen large-format, super-high-resolution 70-mm IMAX movies. I arrived to find clusters of idlers in “NOLAN” sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, grousing outside the theater. The power had gone out, and the 8 am screening of The Odyssey would have to be canceled.

Threats against Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Homeric epic have dogged the movie, basically since its announcement. A certain class of terminally online right-wingers—legitimated and amplified by no less than Elon Musk, on his own echo-chamber social media platform—have been pulling their oars against the movie, and the prevailing tide of public enthusiasm for it.

But there was no sabotage at the King of Prussia Regal Cinema. The local power grid map shows dozens of similar outages across the region, attributable to recent bouts of extreme weather. And I was told this cinema, specifically, had been suffering from outages in recent weeks.

Bracketing a few hundred early-morning soldiers of cinema turned away from a multiplex, and a few thousands dollars in lost revenue for the theater, the boycott against The Odyssey is shaping up to be a tremendous failure. Early ticket sales—including IMAX screenings sold out across the country—are indicating a $200 million worldwide box office return. This would make it the most profitable opening for any of Christopher Nolan’s movies that don’t feature the character Batman.