A Film Studio Is Selling an AI 'Odyssey' Knockoff to Ride Nolan's Wave

Key points

• Fountain 0, an AI film studio, announced Odysseus: The Fall on Tuesday, timed to compete with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.
• Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is projected to earn between $80 million and $100 million in its opening weekend.
• Odysseus: The Fall was made on a budget in the "mid-five figures", compared to the $250 million Nolan spent on his version.
• Director Ash Koosha used Kling's AI video generator and Google's Nano Banana to produce the film, and voiced every character himself.
• Fountain 0 executive chairman Tom Rogers said the project targets people interested in AI rather than traditional moviegoers.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens this weekend, with ticket sales projected to bring in between $80 million and $100 million in a matter of days. Audiences are eager. So is a company that wants to sell them something else entirely.

Film studio Fountain 0 announced this week that it is releasing Odysseus: The Fall, an AI-generated retelling of the same Greek epic, available to rent or buy digitally later this summer. Director Ash Koosha made the film using Kling's AI video generator, a tool that creates video clips from text descriptions, and Google's Nano Banana, another AI image and video tool. Koosha wrote, directed, and edited the film himself, voiced every character, and based his Odysseus on his own appearance. His brother Pooya helped. The budget ran to what Rogers called the "mid-five figures", a far cry from Nolan's $250 million production.

The trailer is telling. Each shot is brief. The visuals carry that over-polished, slightly wrong look that viewers have come to recognise from AI-generated images: technically clean, but somehow hollow. The characters move and speak with a stiffness that no amount of post-processing quite fixes.

Fountain 0 previously produced Dreams of Violets, an AI-generated film about civil unrest in Iran that reportedly cost just $2,000 to make. That project at least carried a documentary purpose. Odysseus: The Fall is harder to read that way.

Is this really a film, or an advertisement?

Honestly, it looks more like an advertisement. Fountain 0's executive chairman, Tom Rogers, told Variety the project targets people who do not enjoy going to cinemas but have an interest in AI. He also suggested the film could send curious viewers to see Nolan's version so they can compare "the highest state of human filmmaking achievement" with "the top state of the art in AI filmmaking today." That framing more or less admits the gap.

The move follows a pattern. ElevenLabs, an AI audio company, recently released an audiobook of The Odyssey narrated by an AI imitation of actor Michael Caine's voice, without Caine's involvement. Startup Particle6 keeps trying to build interest in "AI actress" Tilly Norwood, a fully artificial character, and recently announced its own feature-length film around her avatar.

What connects all of these projects is the strategy: attach an AI product to something people already care about, and hope the attention transfers.

As first reported by The Verge AI, the timing here is not coincidental. Nolan's film dominates the cultural conversation, and Fountain 0 is buying some of that conversation cheaply.

For audiences, the practical upshot is simple. If you see a film or audiobook tied to a major release and the marketing leans heavily on AI production, look twice at who made it and why. The art may be genuine. The timing may not be.