Elon Musk has spent the better part of 2026 attacking Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey from the sidelines. Now he says he will make his own. In a post on X on Wednesday, the xAI owner declared that his AI video tool would deliver a competing version of Homer’s epic before the calendar runs out. “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” he wrote, resharing a three-minute AI-generated short a follower had made using the tool.He offered no further details—no timeline beyond December, no explanation of how a text-to-video model gets to feature length, no word on who would write it. Musk also endorsed a separate suggestion floating on X that Mel Gibson be handed $100 million to shoot an Odyssey with historically accurate ships, armour and weapons, with all dialogue lifted from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek. Musk’s reply: “I’m down.”
The “historically accurate” claim runs into a problem: Homer’s Odyssey is myth, not history
The pitch has an obvious hole in it. Homer’s poem is a work of fiction, composed somewhere in the 7th or 8th century BC, and classicists have been pointing this out throughout the row. Christopher Mackie, emeritus professor of Classics and Ancient History at La Trobe University, has noted that Homer’s poems are pre-Socratic and pre-historical—history as a discipline did not exist when the text was created. There is no historical record of Odysseus to be accurate to.That has not slowed the campaign. Musk’s commentary dates to January, when rumours first circulated that Lupita Nyong’o had been cast as Helen of Troy. He responded to a post calling the casting an insult by writing that Nolan had “lost his integrity.” In May, after a Time profile confirmed Nyong’o in the role—plus a second turn as her sister Clytemnestra—Musk agreed with Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh’s claim that Nolan cast her to avoid accusations of racism. He also amplified transphobic posts about Elliot Page, who was rumoured to be playing Achilles and in fact plays Sinon.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened to $264 million worldwide
The box office has been indifferent to all of it. The Odyssey opened to $124.5 million across 3,919 domestic theatres, the third-biggest debut of the year behind Toy Story 5 and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and $139.6 million from 73 international markets for a $264.1 million global start. That is Nolan’s biggest worldwide opening ever, past The Dark Knight Rises. The film holds an A CinemaScore and 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and posted a $20 million Tuesday in its second week.Premium formats did the heavy lifting. Over half the domestic gross came from large-format screens, with IMAX alone accounting for $51.8 million—the film is the first shot entirely on IMAX cameras, something Nolan has called his longest-held ambition.Nolan, for his part, has waved the accuracy debate away as irrelevant, arguing that arguments held before anyone has seen a film are arguments about nothing.
