Elon Musk is on a crusade against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that isn’t going down well at all in Hollywood. It also doesn’t help that he’s claimed he’ll make his own version, using Grok, which, in his own words, “will be historically accurate and faithful to Homer’s art”. Going so far as to share a three-minute clip by a user of a scene from the Homeric poem created with Grok that, at best, wouldn’t make the cut in any contemporary production.
A controversy turns ugly
Scott Derrickson, director of Doctor Strange and The Black Phone, has responded to all this controversy. Not holding back, he said on his X account, the social network formerly known as Twitter, that “it’s clear that @elonmusk doesn’t know a fucking thing about movies and stopped reading at 20, his opinions on art aren’t worth shit”. Leaving no room for doubt in his message.
It’s not as if Musk has been especially kind in what he’s said about The Odyssey either. Claiming that “Chris Nolan is an anti-white racist” for giving the role of Helen of Troy to Lupita Nyong’o, saying that the film’s casting is “an insult to Homer,” Derrickson’s reaction doesn’t seem disproportionate at this point.
Meanwhile, The Odyssey seems not to have been affected in the slightest by this controversy. Opening with $264 million worldwide, it’s the film with the biggest opening weekend of Christopher Nolan’s career. It also had the third-biggest opening of the year. So it seems that no matter how many insults Musk keeps hurling at the film, Derrickson is right that he doesn’t know much about film and art.
