I recently explored what a failed Instagram experiment tells us about Hollywood’s engagement trap, A24’s deal with Google DeepMind, data brokers as the new Hollywood agents and how athletes are using AI to build their own media empires.
Christopher Nolan spent the kind of money Hollywood once reserved for superheroes and galaxies far, far away to make The Odyssey — a roughly $250 million production with a massive $125 million marketing campaign behind it. Shot on 70mm film specifically for IMAX, the project was designed from its inception as a theatrical event, betting that audiences still wanted a singular cinematic experience created by humans, marketed as an occasion and shared by millions of people at the same time.
Elon Musk has argued that Grok could soon create its own AI version of Homer’s epic, one that would be not just cheaper but more “historically accurate” — presumably replacing Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy with a more authentically “Greek”-looking performer, and swapping out trans actor Elliot Page. Musk suggested backing a Mel Gibson, AI-generated Odyssey with a $100 million investment.
This is the collision coming for Hollywood: one vision built around scarcity, craft and human interpretation; the other built around abundance, computing power and the idea that multiple versions of the same epic can be summoned.
Hollywood has spent the past several years debating whether artificial intelligence will replace writers, actors, directors and visual-effects artists. Those are important questions, but what if AI does not need to make a better Oppenheimer or a better Odyssey to transform Hollywood? What if AI companies can use public-domain classics and steadily improving models to draft off the marketing spends — and the work — of Hollywood’s most talented creators?
The real stakes go far beyond one AI-made epic:
- Why Musk’s “historically accurate” Odyssey misunderstands what the story actually is
- How a Grok Odyssey could draft off Universal’s $125 million marketing campaign
- Why laughing this off would be the same mistake that’s cost Hollywood before
- How the public domain may become AI’s largest entertainment library in history
- Why Nolan’s liberties may be closer to Homer than any AI restoration
- How Netflix’s mockbuster era worked at a few hundred thousand dollars a title — and could work even better at a few thousand
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