Musk's Grok Imagine 'Odyssey' gets seven-minute debut, and ridicule

Musk's promise, made in July on X, was for a full-length, historically accurate adaptation of Homer's epic by the end of the year, after he had repeatedly criticized Christopher Nolan's film version prior to its release. The seven-minute opening episode is a first step toward that pledge, but the reaction online focused on the gap between the ambition and the output: jarring scene transitions, plastic character models and modern English dialogue.

The project was made with Grok Imagine, SpaceXAI's AI image and video generation tool that was released publicly in 2025 and updated in July, and was produced with director Dev Walker and Wonder Studios, a studio founded in 2025 with the mission of becoming the A24 of AI production. Wonder Studios has raised more than $15 million from investors including unnamed angel investors from AI companies like OpenAI and Google Deepmind, according to its website.

Fully AI-generated feature films remain rare, though partly-AI projects exist, such as 'Where the Robots Grow', an 87-minute animated science fiction film from AiMation Studios released in 2024. That production was created with just nine people at a cost of just $8,000 per minute, less than the low-budget television animation sourced overseas at between $10,000 and $20,000 per minute, according to Forbes.