Projects like Odysseus: The Fall highlight how the AI hype machine is powered by stunts and stolen valor.
is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
This weekend, cinephiles across the world will march to their local theaters to feast their eyes on Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey. It’s on track to rake in anywhere between $80–$100 million in just a few days. People are clearly excited to see how Nolan uses cutting-edge filmmaking tech to make the Homeric classic feel fresh. But another director is trying to capitalize on the buzz around Nolan’s project to drum up interest in an Odysseus-focused movie of his own.
On Tuesday, film studio Fountain 0 announced that it is working on an AI-generated reimagining of The Odyssey titled Odysseus: The Fall, which will be available to rent or buy from the company digitally sometime later this summer. The movie comes from director Ash Koosha, who previously collaborated with the startup to make Dreams of Violets — an AI-generated docudrama about the civil unrest and state violence that have rocked Iran between late 2025 and early 2026. Like Dreams of Violets — which reportedly cost only $2,000 to make — Odysseus: The Fall’s production budget is said to be a fraction of a traditionally produced movie’s. Koosha was able to write / direct / edit the movie with a budget in the “mid-five figures,” which is nothing compared to the $250 million Nolan needed to shoot The Odyssey.
Odysseus: The Fall’s trailer makes it pretty obvious what kind of “film” Koosha has cooked up using Kling’s AI video generator and Google’s Nano Banana. Every shot seems short, and they all have that over-glossy aesthetic we associate with AI slop. The characters are modeled after real humans — this Odysseus was modeled after Koosha’s own likeness, and the director voices the entire cast — but there’s still an uncanny stiffness to the way they move and speak that makes them feel wholly AI.
What’s also clear is that Fountain 0 is trying to ride Nolan’s coattails in order to market its AI services while selling what’s essentially a direct-to-video knockoff of a film that people actually want to see. Speaking to Variety, Fountain 0’s executive chairman, Tom Rogers, said that their project is aimed at people who might not “like going to the movie theaters, but have a real interest in AI and what’s going on.” This makes Odysseus: The Fall sound less like a filmmaker’s earnest interpretation of The Odyssey and more like an elaborate advertisement for Fountain 0’s AI-forward production workflow.
“[W]e actually think, when our film is released, that it will be a catalyst for a lot of people who might not otherwise have seen the Odyssey to hopefully go see it, so they can compare the state of the highest state of human filmmaking achievement, which I truly expect the reviews to suggest Nolan’s film is, with what the top state of the art is in AI filmmaking today,” Rogers said.
Rogers wasn’t exactly suggesting Odysseus: The Fall will be able to hold a candle to The Odyssey, but he was saying that Fountain 0’s projects represent the best kind of “films” that AI firms are capable of making. Rogers might genuinely believe that his company’s features are good, but when you watch Dreams of Violets — which plays like a collection of prompted clips — it’s hard to imagine theatergoers would agree with him.
Seeing the visual grandeur and studied artistry of Nolan’s The Odyssey makes you appreciate how it is the product of hundreds of humans tirelessly working together to make a truly epic piece of art. Fountain 0 has made a big deal out of the fact that Koosha and his brother Pooya did most of the work on Odysseus: The Fall themselves, but that isn’t really the sort of thing that convinces people to buy movie tickets.
Though there was a (dubious) argument to be made that Dreams of Violets was trying to raise public awareness about Iran’s history of human rights violations, it’s hard not to see Odysseus: The Fall as yet another AI-hyping stunt that has little to do with the celebration of art. This was similarly true of ElevenLabs’ recently released The Odyssey audiobook narrated by an AI-generated facsimile of Michael Caine. It’s also the entire ethos behind studio / startup Particle6’s repeated attempts to convince everyone that “AI actress” Tilly Norwood is a thing that we should all spend time thinking about.
Like Fountain 0, Particle6 recently announced its own plans to put out a feature-length movie starring an avatar. Both of these companies seem to think that they can troll their way into relevance before becoming widely accepted parts of the entertainment industry. But what they don’t seem to realize is that the thing that gets people eager to see a film like Nolan’s The Odyssey is the way it embodies the deeply collaborative human elements of traditional filmmaking.
The effusive praise and hateful backlash that The Odyssey has drawn both speak to Nolan’s ability to craft works of art that elicit genuine emotion from audiences. Those powerful feelings are what drive film discourse and get people buying movie tickets, which keeps major studios like Universal in business. For all the promises that gen AI is going to fundamentally reshape the entertainment industry, the technology’s boosters have yet to release a film or series that comes anywhere close to drumming up the excitement Nolan’s fans have for The Odyssey. And they never will if stunts like the one Fountain 0 is trying to pull are all they have to offer.
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