Elon Musk offers $100 million to Mel Gibson for Homeric Greek Odyssey film
Elon Musk has suggested he would provide $100 million to director Mel Gibson to produce an adaptation of The Odyssey filmed entirely in Homeric Greek, the artificial literary language of the original 8th century BCE epic poem.
The proposal emerged Monday on X, where a user suggested Musk fund Gibson to create a version featuring "painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting" with dialogue "taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek." Musk responded eight hours later with a succinct "I'm down."
The offer comes as Musk continues his pointed criticism of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which opened July 17 to a domestic box office of $124 million and a worldwide total of $263.7 million. Nolan's film, produced with an estimated $250 million budget and shot on IMAX 70mm across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, and Malta, drew inspiration from Emily Wilson's 2017 English translation rather than the source material's original language.
Musk's ongoing critique of Nolan's casting
The tech entrepreneur, who became the world's first trillionaire on June 12 when SpaceX went public, has repeatedly taken issue with Nolan's casting choices. He has criticized the inclusion of actress Lupita Nyong'o and transgender actor Elliot Page, who plays the Greek soldier Sinon in the film. In January, Musk wrote that Nolan had "lost his integrity" over the casting of Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. In May, he claimed Nolan "wants the awards" in response to suggestions the director was "keen to race swap white characters."
Tuesday, Musk escalated his alternative vision by stating that Grok Imagine, his AI assistant's image and video generator, would "make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer" before year's end. He quoted an AI-generated video depicting a dialogue scene from the epic, which together garnered more than 18 million views.
Gibson's track record with ancient languages
Gibson has demonstrated experience with ancient language filmmaking. His 2006 film Apocalypto was shot entirely in Yucatec Maya, with many actors learning the language specifically for production. The director's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ earned over $612 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, establishing him as a commercially successful director of historically themed religious material.
However, Gibson is currently committed to The Resurrection of the Christ, a two-part sequel scheduled for release on May 6, 2027 and May 25, 2028. Filming wrapped in Italy earlier this year.
Filming The Odyssey in its original language would present unprecedented challenges. Homeric Greek is an artificial literary dialect composed primarily of archaic Ionic Greek with Aeolic elements, created specifically for epic poetry in dactylic hexameter. The original poem consists of 12,109 lines and was never actually spoken as a living language.
Nolan recently compared AI to "a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside," telling HugoDécrypte it was "a transparent horse, it's made of glass. Everybody can see what's going on inside of there."
Musk's involvement in Hollywood has been minimal. His only credited film work was as executive producer on the 2005 black comedy Thank You for Smoking, directed by Jason Reitman. His net worth is estimated at $750.2 billion by Forbes, though it has fluctuated around the trillion-dollar mark throughout June and July due to SpaceX and Tesla stock volatility.
