Musk promised a full-length AI Odyssey. Episode 1 runs seven minutes

Three months after Elon Musk promised a full-length AI film of Homer’s epic, the first instalment is out, and it runs seven minutes. Grok Imagine, the video generator from Musk’s AI company, released Episode 1 of its Odyssey series on X on Friday, October 23, made with the London-based Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker.

Watch Episode 1 of our Odyssey series made with Grok Imagine.

Let us know in the comments if you’d like a full breakdown of how it was done!

Creative collaboration with @WonderStudiosX and director Dev Walker @glumlot_

— Grok Imagine (@imagine) October 23, 2026

Musk reposted it early on Saturday with the words “Odyssey with Grok Imagine”. By Sunday afternoon the original post had been viewed more than 3.3 million times.

What Episode 1 is

The video is 7 minutes and 12 seconds long and posted in 4K. It covers the Greeks arriving at Troy, which is not actually in the Odyssey: Homer’s poem opens ten years after the Trojan War ended, with Odysseus still trying to get home. Grok Imagine calls it the first episode of a series but hasn’t said how many episodes there will be, how long the finished work will run or where it will be shown beyond X.

Wonder Studios promoted it with a one-line pitch: “Homer didn’t have Grok… we do.” The studio, founded by Xavier Collins and Justin Hackney and with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles, makes commercials and original films with generative AI. It raised $12 million in seed funding led by Atomico in October 2025, and has worked for clients including YouTube, the BBC, Google DeepMind and Universal Music Group.

How it was made

Very little is public yet. The credits make clear it was not a one-click job: a studio and a named human director shaped it, using Grok Imagine to generate the footage. Grok Imagine has offered to post “a full breakdown of how it was done” if enough viewers ask, but hasn’t said how many clips were generated, how much was edited by hand, or whether the voices and music were AI-made too.

It is the latest step in a project the company has been teasing for months. On September 29 the Grok account posted an Odyssey pilot with the line “No cameras were harmed in the making of this Odyssey pilot.”

‘Historically accurate and true to the art of Homer’

The project began as a jab at Christopher Nolan, whose star-studded The Odyssey opened in July after months of attacks from Musk over its casting. Five days after it reached cinemas, Musk made a promise on X, quote-posting a dialogue scene that the studio Heavy Pulp had built with Grok Imagine:

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

Elon Musk, on X, July 22

Measured against that, Episode 1 is a start rather than a delivery. A feature film usually runs at least 90 minutes, and Nolan’s runs close to three hours. With about ten weeks left in the year, Grok Imagine would need many more episodes, or one long cut, to meet the deadline.

Early reviews were not kind. Chance Townsend, reviewing it for Mashable, gave Musk credit for following through on “one of his sillier promises” but found the writing weak and the characters hard to tell apart, with Odysseus the only one named in the whole episode. He also pointed to familiar AI video flaws: “unnaturally perfect teeth”, weightless “almost water-like” hair, smudgy skin and backgrounds that sharpen late.

Grok Imagine has drawn a different kind of attention this year: Musk’s company recently got Minnesota’s ban on AI fake nudes put on hold, a law aimed at tools like it. Hollywood, meanwhile, is edging in more quietly: Ben Affleck said this month that he used AI for “lots of things” in his new Netflix film, mostly behind the scenes.

Why it matters

Seven minutes is long for an AI-made film, since video models still generate short clips that people have to stitch together, so Episode 1 is a real showcase for Grok Imagine. It is also nowhere near the full-length film Musk promised, and the year-end deadline is now the test of whether the rest arrives.

Sources: Grok Imagine on X; Elon Musk on X (July 22); Elon Musk on X (October 24); Wonder Studios on X; Grok on X; Mashable (Chance Townsend); Business Insider.