Musk says Grok AI will make a full-length ‘historically accurate’ Odyssey movie—also offers Mel Gibson $100 million to make better version of film

Responding on X to a three-minute AI-generated clip depicting a scene of Odysseus, Musk wrote: “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.” Musk has been heavily promoting Grok Imagine, which allows users to generate strikingly realistic AI video.

In response to a separate post that suggested Musk give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation that is more historically accurate, Musk replied: “I’m down.”

Musk’s comments come just days after Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Greek epic hit theaters. The X owner had previously criticized Nolan’s casting decisions that included a black actress playing Helen of Troy and transgender-identifying actress Elliot Page playing a strong male figure. Musk said that “[Nolan] wants the awards” and that “[he] has lost his integrity.”

Despite the backlash, Nolan’s film has been a huge financial success, pulling in more than $264 million at box offices worldwide during its opening weekend, according to a report by The Guardian. Many on the conservative right online have been debating the film, with some pointing to the heavy DEI-related elements in its casting and character arcs they believe strayed too far from its source material, while others say the movie is genuinely good and carries pro-conservative themes.

Daily Wire hosts Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro have been the most notable voices debating the film on X over the past week on the right. Walsh said “literally all of the criticisms by conservatives were entirely correct,” arguing that the movie’s casting “completely takes you out of the story right from the beginning.” He also criticized Nolan’s portrayal of Odysseus as an “anachronistic whiney, solemn shell of a man plagued by ‘trauma’ and guilt.”

Walsh said: “It’s impossible to overlook these flaws because the film itself is not terribly entertaining or well constructed. For the most part it is disjointed, dull, self-serious, disenchanted, somehow feeling both verbose and overly rushed at the same time. The dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a ‘critically acclaimed’ film. ‘On the nose’ and ‘clunky’ are descriptions that can’t even begin to describe this script. At no point in the story does Nolan ever transport the audience to the ancient world. You never feel like you’re 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you’re watching modern Americans put on a pageant, because you are. Nobody would be calling this thing a masterpiece if it was made by a director not named Christopher Nolan.”

Shapiro, meanwhile, broadly praised the film, calling it a “masterpiece,” and argued that conservatives were missing “the Biblical forest for the woke trees.”

“The entire movie is rooted in what Nolan terms ‘Zeus' law.’ That law is: ‘Treat others as you would want to be treated, because anyone might be a god.’ Now, clearly, there's nothing like that in Greek mythology. It's not implicit in Homer. It's a direct rip from Biblical morality, substituting ‘because anyone might be a god’ for ‘because man was made in the image of God,’” Shapiro wrote.