Spoilers for Heartstopper Forever ahead.

July 17 was a fantastic day for anyone who loves the movies. Not only did we have the release of Christopher Nolan's epic The Odyssey, but Netflix has wrapped up one of its most beloved IPs with a full-length feature in Heartstopper Forever.

Clearly, these are two very separate events. The Odyssey is set to be a theatrical phenomenon, currently screening in IMAX 70mm around the world, and is set to take at least $200 million at the international box office across its opening weekend.

Meanwhile, Heartstopper fans will be streaming Nick (Kit Connor) and Charlie's (Joe Locke) final farewell from the comfort of their own homes. The series has swapped format after its original three TV seasons, but the movie runtime is still equivalent to around 4.5 episodes.

If you're anything like me, you'll be doing both in a double bill that not even Barbenheimer could touch the sides of. But what if I told you there's a direct nod to The Odyssey in Heartstopper Forever if you know where to look?

Charlie's Odyssey poster in Heartstopper Forever is the perfect nod to the Christopher Nolan movie

When Nick and Charlie briefly break up, Charlie spends a great deal of time in bed to try and keep his problems at bay. When friends Elle (Yasmin Finney), Isaac (Tobie Donovan), and Tao (William Gao) arrive to stage an intervention, we see a poster of The Odyssey hanging above Charlie's head.

This isn't a detail we've seen in the previous three seasons, so I'd like to think that it is a direct Easter egg nod to the Nolan movie's release — despite this not being confirmed.

"Wonder if there'll also be a Heartstopper poster in The Odyssey movie," one fan joked on X/Twitter, who also spotted the background detail.

As with everything Heartstopper creator Alice Oseman has put her name to, the detail in Heartstopper Forever is nothing short of beautiful. The Odyssey reference isn't the only Easter egg you'll spot in the movie, but not more spoilers here... make sure you read our ending explainer to catch up on what you might have missed.

Are this week's movie releases going to join forces to become a legitimate double bill? I highly doubt it. But the fact that two such separate creations can briefly come together to share a wonderful moment is a testament to the power of cinema and creating meaningful art.

You could hardly say Netflix is a business in trouble, but it does have a problem: for a lot of its shows, viewing figures are declining sharply after the first season. According to Bloomberg, Beef lost more than 70% of its viewers going into its second season, while The Night Agent lost 50% of its audience in season two.

This seems to be a pattern repeated over many Netflix shows, including some that rack up impressive viewing figures in their first season. The streaming platform relies on subscribers sticking around, and these stats are apparently "a major source of concern" for the executives at Netflix.

So what's going on? While I'm not privy to the internal discussions at Netflix or the statistics that its executives are available to them, I am a Netflix subscriber of many years standing — and I have a few ideas about what's going on.

Viewing fatigue

There's a lot to get through these days, isn't there? Tens of millions of songs on music streaming platforms, more movies than you'll ever have time to watch in ten lifetimes, and of course the entire history of TV — with new shows appearing weekly. It's perhaps no surprise that we're all finding it hard to stick with successive series when there's so much more out there to watch and listen to.

The way that Netflix's stats work, is that a drop-off in viewing numbers for a second season also includes those who abandoned the show somewhere along the way during the first run of episodes. And if you're not getting grabbed episode after episode by the plot and the characters, it's all too tempting to click away.

That's a shame for slow burn shows and those that need time to get going, and perhaps we all need to learn to be a bit more patient. However, it goes some way to explaining why Netflix shows can shed a lot of viewers after the initial pull of the first few episodes — there's an awful lot competing for our attention.

The binge model

For the most part, Netflix continues to drop its shows all at once, so as soon as they're live you can binge watch an entire season. Sometimes it's great to be able to burn through a bunch of episodes, but it also means you can be done with an entire season very quickly.

This exacerbates the problem of gaps between series (of which more in a moment), but it also means shows can be quickly forgotten in the rush of everything else that's going on. Some of my favorite TV shows are those that come out week by week: I watch the episode, then I catch up on the recap podcasts.

It means shows last longer — not in terms of the actual running time, but in terms of how many days and weeks it takes to get through a season. I actually quite like being able to binge shows sometimes, but it does mean they can be quickly forgotten.

Season-to-season gaps

This isn't something that only affects Netflix, but we're still seeing huge gaps between seasons of shows — and unless the viewing experience is very special, that's likely to lead to waning enthusiasm from audiences as the months and years drag on.

Silo isn't a Netflix show, but the point is the same: as I was settling down to watch the third season a few days ago, even the initial recap montage had me confused (there was a mere 18 months between the end of season two and the start of season three). There were parts I didn't remember, and I had to head over to Wikipedia to get caught up.

Stranger Things is a Netflix show, and while I did manage to drag myself through it in its entirety, it was a struggle towards the end. The show lasted for just shy of a decade, and there are huge swathes of it that are no longer in my memory banks. It's not easy to produce television shows quickly, but the slow rollouts aren't helping their chances.

A trust issue

I've seen Netflix's regular cancellation of shows floated as a reason for second-series-syndrome, and I think this is an issue for program makers as well as audiences. If you don't know whether or not you're getting a second or third season, then you have to throw everything into the first one, and think more about wrapping it up neatly than extending it.

The Night Agent is one of the Netflix shows I've found it hard to stay with: the original rookie-on-the-run premise worked well and the first season was propulsive entertainment, but as it's continued, it's become more of a by-the-numbers action thriller. It's almost like they're making it up as they go.

Compare that with something like Bridgerton, which is a Netflix show I have managed to keep up with. It is of course based on a series of books (as is Apple TV's Slow Horses by the way), and that helps to ensure variety from season-to-season, with the focus switching between different characters and plotlines.

I'm not sure exactly how Netflix can fix the problem of viewing numbers declining in season two — I'm not a highly paid TV executive after all — but those are a few thoughts about why it's happening.