Elon Musk has announced plans to make a feature-length AI adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, saying Grok Imagine will produce a “historically accurate” version before the end of the year.
With his post on X on Wednesday, he also shared a three-minute AI-generated clip created by another user depicting a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso, which the user said had been produced using Grok Imagine, the image and video generation tool developed by Musk’s AI company.
In a separate post, Musk responded to another X user that he would be “down” to give Mel Gibson $100m to produce an Odyssey film.
The user suggested that Gibson’s version would have “painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek”.
Musk has criticised Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey for months, taking offence in particular to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra and Elliot Page as Sinon.
The Oscar winner’s film adaptation of the Greek epic opened last week to a strong critical and viewer reception, and a worldwide collection of $264m. The film follows Odysseus’s long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War as he battles monsters, gods and mythical foes while his wife Penelope fends off suitors and their son Telemachus searches for him.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway stars as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus.
The ensemble cast also includes Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous, Zendaya as Athena, Samantha Morton as Circe, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Elliot Page, Bill Irwin, and Mia Goth feature as well.
Earlier this year in January, Musk hit out at Nolan on X, claiming that the director had “lost his integrity” over the casting Nyong’o, who is Black, as Helen of Troy.
In March, Musk again wrote on X calling Nolan an “anti-White racist”, claiming the director had cast Nyong’o because he “wants the awards”.
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Nyong’o addressed the controversy in May and dismissed the criticism of her casting. In an interview with Elle, she said: “This is a mythological story. I’m very supportive of Chris’s intention with it and with the version of this story that he is telling. Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defence. The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.”
Musk also reposted posts mocking and misgendering Page after rumours circulated that the actor had been cast as Achilles. Musk described another post mocking Page’s casting as “a banger”.
It was later confirmed that Page plays Sinon, a Greek soldier from Virgil’s Aeneid, not Achilles.
Hours before Musk’s post announcing his Grok Imagine version of The Odyssey, Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson made a post on X, writing: “Clearly Elon Musk doesn’t know s*** about cinema & he stopped reading in his 20s. His opinions on art are worthless.”
After one user argued that “no one’s opinion on art is worthless”, Derrickson replied: “Great art says otherwise.”
Nolan has largely dismissed the criticism surrounding his film, saying that debates on historical accuracy before anyone had seen the film were “irrelevant”.
“These conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,” he told The Telegraph last week.
He also said he had noticed a “rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology” among younger filmmakers. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it,” he said.
Nolan also recently compared artificial intelligence to the Trojan horse, used by the Greeks to infiltrate the city of Troy at the end of the Trojan War. “I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside. It’s a transparent horse, it’s made of glass. Everybody can see what’s going on inside of there,” he told French journalist Hugo Travers, in a YouTube interview for HugoDécrypte.
The Odyssey is playing in theatres now.
