For months, Elon Musk and the right-wing cranks he caters to on X have whipped themselves into a raging froth over the supposed desecration of an ancient Greek poem by one of the most successful movie directors alive.
Now that their manufactured backlash has bombed, they’re searching for ways to cope with the reality that they are increasingly divorced from popular opinion.
Christopher Nolan’s artistic crimes in bringing The Odyssey to the screen, according to Musk and others in a furor, were instances of what they called “historical inaccuracy” in a lavish fantasy teeming with monsters, witches, and undead spirits—mainly the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, who is Black, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, who is trans, as Sinon. The grand total of approximately 10 minutes of screen time between these actors in a three-hour saga, combined with the general hysteria over “wokeness” in Hollywood, a rejection of Americanized dialog, and lingering misogyny regarding scholar Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s epic (the first by a woman), resulted in countless teeth-gnashing posts and calls for a boycott that never materialized.
Instead, the mythic drama hauled in a staggering $264 million as it opened this past weekend, sailing toward continued box office dominance and, in all likelihood, a slew of awards. A few conservative commentators, including Ben Shapiro—no fan of DEI or “woke” values—acknowledged it as a landmark achievement. But while some who had predicted its doom knew enough to move on from this battle to other fronts in the culture war, many sank deeper into denial.
“BREAKING,” blared one anonymous X account on Monday. “The Odyssey is FAKING ticket sales by buying up theaters/seats (Fraud) to make the movie look like a success (already $400 million in the hole) moviegoers are reporting having to take terrible seats (because full) but when they show up the theaters are mostly empty.” The post included screenshots of unverifiable anecdotes from Reddit about quiet cinemas and no-show ticket holders.
What Universal Pictures, the studio behind the film, would stand to gain by spending millions beyond a $250 million production budget and $125 million in marketing costs to astroturf a flop was not exactly clear. Then again, these are the same conspiracists who find it suspicious that the critics’ reviews tend to all be published at the same time.
Musk, for his part, seemed to be inspired by an X user who posted three minutes of AI-generated scenes in which characters from The Odyssey are all white and speak in British accents. Commenting on the clip, which at best resembles a montage from a hokey 1970s adaptation, the richest man in the world declared: “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.”
Those familiar with Musk know that when he vows to reach a milestone by year’s end, it basically never happens. The promise of a Grok-animated Odyssey, though minor compared to most of his ambitions—he even speculated in 2025 that the xAI model might “discover new technologies” within several months—is sure to fall by the wayside as well. Not only is it a tiresome idea with zero appeal to the mainstream moviegoer (who has or will soon see Nolan’s version), it’s also unoriginal: The AI studio Fountain 0 is planning the online release of an artificially generated feature titled Odyssey: The Fall this summer.