This weekend will see the release of two The Odyssey adaptations, one of which is Christopher Nolan’s $250 million epic, and the other being a low-budget AI project.
The company behind Odysseus: The Fall, Fountain O, set the release date on July 17, the same day of release as Nolan’s The Odyssey.
The film’s creator, Ash Koosha, stated that he wishes his movie “furthers” the success of Nolan’s film and that he wants viewers of both films to “compare” them, as per a Hollywood Reporter article.
Odysseus: The Fall will be available to rent on Fountain O’s website starting this weekend for the price of $9.99.
What we know about ‘Odysseus: The Fall’
The film, with a budget somewhere in the tens of thousands, will have a total runtime of 135 minutes.
Koosha has revealed that the film will be an alternate reading of the Greek text and will show the “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes,” as stated on Fountain O’s website.
This will be Koosha’s second AI-generated project, his first having been the docu-film Dream of Violets about the January 2026 Iranian crackdown on protests which premiered at the Tribeca film festival.
The Iranian filmmaker is, unsurprisingly, an avid supporter of generative AI, saying of AI-generated films in his director statement that “a person with something urgent to say has made every one of them”.
READ MORE: Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ hits cinemas amid controversies and curiosity
The comparison
The release date for Odysseus: The Fall is by no means a mistake. It was a deliberate choice by the filmmaker as he himself said he wants his film to be compared to The Odyssey.
It is clear that Fountain O’s view of their film is that it is the ultimate demonstration of what AI is capable of producing, which will inevitably be compared to what the human effort can produce in Nolan’s film.
Koosha argues that AI filmmaking is the way forward in terms of democratising the elitist film industry, allowing any creative the necessary tools and autonomy to produce movies,
It will then be up to audiences to decide which of the two will be more worthy of their time: a multi-hundred-million dollar project made by humans, or a cheaper, AI-imagined feature.
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