Elon Musk promised an AI Odyssey to beat Christopher Nolan's — Grok delivered 7 minutes
The "historically accurate full-length movie" has 66 days left on its own deadline, and the first installment opens with a scene that isn't in Homer.
The promise is on the record from this summer. After months of attacking Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, Musk announced that "Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate," as Far Out reported at the time.
On October 26, Grok posted the first result on X: a seven-minute "episode," made with AI studio Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, per Euronews. That leaves 66 days to get from seven minutes to feature length.
What seven minutes bought
The reaction on r/television zeroed in on the craft, starting with the one thing a movie has to do — keep its characters recognizable from shot to shot:
"How are they this proud of coherency this fucking bad? The characters have different faces every shot. It feels like I have dementia."
— a commenter on r/television
Euronews' own viewing notes line up: strange movement, scattered narrative, an airbrushed and oddly uniform look. Viewers quoted in the piece called it "pure garbage" and "basically a 7 minute C level trailer."
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Then there's the claim the whole project was built on. The episode depicts the Greeks landing at Troy — an event that happens before Homer's poem begins, in a clip that also isn't in Greek.
Musk's one stated requirement was historical accuracy. Episode one opens with a scene the Odyssey does not contain.
The scoreboard he picked
Musk chose the comparison himself, which is the painful part. Nolan's The Odyssey opened July 17 and has earned close to $1.8 billion worldwide — a number the Reddit thread wielded like a punchline:
"He actually went through with that shit after the movie made a billion?"
— a commenter on r/television
That commenter is off by $800 million, in Nolan's favor. The bet was that generative video could out-Homer the most commercially successful film of Nolan's career, and the first evidence shipped at one-seventeenth the length of the thing it was supposed to beat. The year ends December 31; the deadline is Musk's own.
Previously we wrote: Stallone fought a studio to play Rocky. Now he's telling young actors to surrender to AI