Grok Imagine posts 7-minute AI 'Odyssey' episode, three months after Musk promised a full film by year-end

On Friday, Oct. 23, the Grok Imagine account on X posted what it called "Episode 1 of our Odyssey series," a video of about seven minutes and 12 seconds made with xAI's video generator. Elon Musk shared it with the message "Odyssey with Grok Imagine."

The post credits a "creative collaboration" with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. Both specialize in AI filmmaking.

That is not the movie Musk promised.

The promise and the delivery

On July 22, Musk wrote on X: "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 attached a three-minute AI short of the story made by another X user.

What arrived three months later is a single installment framed as the start of a series. Grok Imagine has not said how many episodes are planned or when the next one will land.

The episode shows Odysseus sharpening a knife and cutting himself. Penelope tells him he must go on the expedition and hands him a small wooden horse to bring home to their son, Telemachus. The men sail for Troy, and battle footage is intercut with Telemachus growing up and training for combat.

All the characters speak English, not Homeric Greek. Rolling Stone's Daniel Kreps noted that this alone departs from the "historically accurate" billing.

Why Musk got into this

The project grew out of Musk's months-long attack on Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," which opened in July. Musk objected to the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and, in the run-up to release, to rumors that Elliot Page would play Achilles. Page ended up playing Sinon.

Musk said Nolan had "lost his integrity," according to a February post. He also claimed Nolan made those casting choices to satisfy the Academy's representation and inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility. His stated complaint was about fidelity to the source. Rolling Stone reports that he went further and accused Nolan of being an anti-White racist.

Mashable's counter is that Helen is a figure of Greek myth, that historians still debate whether anything like the Trojan War occurred, and that Sinon comes from Virgil's Roman-era "Aeneid," not Homer. Musk has not answered that point in anything cited here.

The film's critics have now turned the fidelity argument around. Crypto Briefing and Mashable both note that the Grok version has drawn scrutiny for an all-white cast. Musk has not publicly addressed that criticism.

Director Scott Derrickson responded to Musk's July pledge on X: "Clearly @elonmusk doesn't know shit about cinema & he stopped reading in his 20s. His opinions on art are worthless."

The numbers

Nolan's film has grossed more than $1.78 billion worldwide, according to figures cited by Rolling Stone and Crypto Briefing, including more than $600 million in the U.S. Imax screenings sold out for months. Musk and right-leaning commentators had predicted a flop under the line "go woke, go broke." The box office went the other way.

Nolan shot across six countries with a cast and crew in the thousands. He has called himself a "techno-skeptic" and told AFP earlier this year that he is wary of generative AI replacing human creativity.

Grok's episode had about 4 million views on X as of Rolling Stone's publication. It is not clear how many of those viewers watched to the end.

How it plays

Reviews are harsh. TechCrunch's Anthony Ha wrote that a few shots could pass for real actors on a real sea. He called the whole thing "airless," with a long voiceover backstory, stilted shouted dialogue and no momentum. He said he was checking the runtime before the clip reached the halfway mark. That is one critic's view, and Ha said he could not judge the historical accuracy.

Rolling Stone's Kreps said the footage borrows heavily from Nolan's look but is less awe-inspiring. He added that the acting is "soulless and wooden," a complaint he said was common even among AI-tolerant commenters.

The A.V. Club's Olivia Singh said it plays more like a choppy trailer than the opening of a feature.

Some of the praise is narrower. The aggregator NewsCord quotes the site WeRSM as saying the episode shows generative video can produce "convincing fragments of large-scale spectacle" without proving the technology can sustain a full film.

Mashable also pointed to MuskOmeter, a site that tracks his pledges and puts his follow-through rate at about 24 percent.

What to watch

The deadline is Musk's own: a full-length, historically accurate film before Dec. 31, 2026. Nothing posted so far says whether the series format replaces that pledge or sits alongside it.

The remaining episodes, and whether they arrive in the roughly two months left, will show if this was the start of a film or a one-off demo.