Grok releases the first seven minutes of its AI-generated 'Odyssey'

On October 23, the official X account of Grok Imagine, xAI’s AI video generation tool, posted “Episode 1 of our Odyssey series made with Grok Imagine” — a clip running a little over seven minutes, credited as a collaboration with the AI studio Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, per the post text quoted by Variety and Rolling Stone. Three months after Elon Musk promised a full-length AI film of The Odyssey before the end of the year, what arrived was not a movie. It was seven minutes.

Key points

• Episode 1, roughly seven minutes long, went up on the @imagine X account on October 23, generated with Grok Imagine in credited collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker; Rolling Stone counted about 4 million views as of its October 25 press time.
• Musk’s July pledge, quoted identically by Variety and Rolling Stone: “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.” Variety’s verdict: he “partially followed through.”
• The reviews converge: TechCrunch calls the whole thing “completely airless,” Rolling Stone filed it under its “Grok Slop” column, and early viewers say “soulless” and “wooden” — while the characters speak English, not Homeric Greek, so the “historically accurate” half of the promise went unmet.

Background and promise

The clip lands after three months of a running feud. Musk spent the winter and spring attacking Christopher Nolan’s live-action The Odyssey: he claimed the director “lost his integrity” over casting in February (Mashable), wrote “Chris Nolan is an anti-White racist” in March (Variety), and reshared posts attacking Elliot Page’s casting in May (Mashable). Nolan, who shot his film practically across six countries with thousands of cast and crew (TechCrunch), calls himself “a techno-skeptic” and says AI is the one technology he has seen “so completely rejected by the public.” Nolan’s film opened in July to $124.5 million (Mashable), against a production budget of roughly $250 million (Jiemian), and has since passed $600 million domestic and $1.78 billion worldwide (Rolling Stone, as of press time). In July, Musk made his own film pledge and reshared a three-minute AI-generated short posted by an X user (Variety); a Chinese analysis in August framed the stakes as “Grok 4.6 is at the table, but Musk still owes an Odyssey” (Jiemian). The wider AI-video race is accelerating too — Kuaishou’s Kling 4.0 opened full access this month with 30-second native generations (our coverage) — and the contest has moved from single shots to finished stories.

The facts

What shipped on October 23, set against the July promise:

	July promise	October 23 delivery
Scale	One full-length film	Episode 1 of a series, seven minutes (“a whole seven minutes” per TechCrunch, “a little over seven minutes” per Mashable)
“Historically accurate”	True to Homer’s art	All characters speak English, not Homeric Greek (Rolling Stone)
Timeline	Before the end of 2026	No release date for a full film; nothing accompanied the release beyond the post (Variety)

Other checkable details: about 4 million views at Rolling Stone’s press time; Episode 1 covers the Greeks’ arrival at Troy (Mashable); Odysseus is the only named character in those seven minutes (Mashable); every character is white — Mashable’s words are “Every character is white,” and TechCrunch writes that the cast “come in a Musk-approved skin color.” Wonder Studios’ promo line, per Mashable: “Homer didn’t have Grok… we do.”

What others say

TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha is the most specific: the whole thing “feels completely airless,” with “no sense of momentum, no reason to care about anyone or anything on-screen.” The narrator uses the British accent “familiar from fantasy games,” the lines are stilted enough to make Nolan’s dialogue sound Shakespearean, and the backstory voiceover “seems to go on forever” — he was listlessly checking the remaining runtime before the halfway mark. He concedes it is “not as spectacularly ugly” as expected and that some shots could pass for “real actors sailing across a real sea.” Rolling Stone’s Daniel Kreps reports that the commonest words in the comments — including among “the AI-tolerant viewers” — are “soulless” and “wooden,” and calls the look derivative of Nolan’s film but “less awe-inspiring.” Variety’s Payton Turkeltaub frames it as “partially followed through” and quotes Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson on X: “Clearly @elonmusk doesn’t know shit about cinema & he stopped reading in his 20s” and “His opinions on art are worthless.” Mashable’s Chance Townsend catalogs the tells — unnaturally perfect teeth, weightless hair, smudgy skin, background textures that pop in — and notes the characters “look similar or look way too similar to real people,” a resemblance the site’s own caption flags with a question (“Is that not Kristofer Hivju?”).

Our take

For anyone building an AI video pipeline, these seven minutes are a rare upper-bound sample: xAI has the compute, the distribution and a specialist studio in the credits, and the result still stalls at “the shots pass, the film doesn’t” — the gap between rendering and storytelling is wider than any benchmark suggests. The switch from “a movie” to “a series” is also a lesson in promise management: deliver seven minutes at a time, and the promise stays permanently “partially” kept. MuskOmeter, the third-party pledge tracker Mashable cites, puts Musk’s promise hit rate at about 24%, and this release is another data point. Grok’s recent troubles don’t stop at video, either — in a forced-choice study across 479 midterm races, Grok 4.7 recommended the Republican candidate about 92% of the time (our earlier coverage). Still unknown: the cadence of future episodes, whether a full film actually arrives this year, and the real division of labor between Wonder Studios and Dev Walker — Variety notes xAI said nothing beyond the post itself.