Elon Musk has apparently found yet another way to wage war on Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey – by volunteering to bankroll a rival version directed by Mel Gibson.
The billionaire sparked fresh disbelief on X after responding to a fan’s remarkably specific proposal for an alternative adaptation of Homer’s epic poem.
‘I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,’ the user wrote.
Musk responded: ‘I’m down.’
Whether he was making a genuine offer or simply joining in the online discussion is unclear, but the comment comes just hours after the Tesla and SpaceX boss announced another ambitious Odyssey project of his own.
Musk declared that his artificial intelligence platform, Grok Imagine, would create a feature-length adaptation of Homer’s epic before the end of the year.
‘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, sharing an AI-generated clip depicting Odysseus and the nymph Calypso.
The flurry of posts marks the latest chapter in Musk’s increasingly personal campaign against Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey.
Long before the film reached cinemas, Musk repeatedly criticised the Oscar-winning director’s casting choices, including Black actress and Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o portraying Helen of Troy, famed as the most beautiful woman in the world, instead of a white woman, and questioning the masculinity of trans star Elliot Page’s role in the film too – incorrectly reporting him to be famed Greek warrior Achilles.
In May, Musk publicly backed criticism of Nyong’o’s casting by agreeing with a post from conservative commentator Matt Walsh.
Walsh wrote: ‘We’re told that we shouldn’t object to Helen of Troy being portrayed as a black woman. And yet if a major Hollywood studio made a film set in Africa and cast a white woman as “the most beautiful woman in Africa,” those same people would literally riot in the street. If, say, Sydney Sweeney was cast in the role, they’d be driven to murderous violence. We all know this is the case.’
Musk replied: ‘Absolutely true. Such hypocrisy in Hollywood.’
Then, when Elliot Page’s casting was first rumoured, Musk wrote on X: ‘One of the dumbest and most twisted things I’ve ever heard.’
He also accused Nolan of chasing awards and claimed the director had ‘lost his integrity’.
But all of Musk’s whining has done little to slow the film’s success.
Starring Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, The Odyssey opened to rave reviews and earned $264million (£198m) worldwide during its opening weekend, alongside a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Nyong’o previously brushed off criticism of the film’s diverse cast, saying: ‘Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defence.’
Nolan, meanwhile, dismissed the pre-release backlash as largely irrelevant.
‘These conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,’ he told The Hollywood Reporter.
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The director has also taken aim at the growing hype surrounding artificial intelligence in filmmaking – something that puts him directly at odds with Musk’s latest plans.
‘The idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s a nonsense,’ Nolan said, adding that he’d ‘never seen a technology’ embraced so enthusiastically by investors while being so widely rejected by the public.
As for Gibson, the Braveheart and Hacksaw Ridge director has given no indication that he has any interest in revisiting ancient Greece – let alone directing a $100 million epic performed entirely in Homeric Greek.
Still, if Musk has his way, Nolan’s Odyssey may soon have competition from both artificial intelligence and an entirely different Hollywood heavyweight.