Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened to $124.5 million domestically and pulled in $264 million worldwide in one weekend. Critics also gave it a 95% fresh score across 345 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s the best a Nolan film has ever gotten, but somehow the Oscar-winning filmmaker still caught a lot of flak from people who took to X to vent their frustrations.
Much of that anger stems from the fact that he didn’t cast any Greek or Mediterranean actors in a lead role. Lupita Nyong’o playing both Helen of Troy and her half-sister Clytemnestra drew the most criticism from the right-wing corners of the internet. All that backlash hasn’t affected the box office numbers and Rotten Tomatoes score, and it shows that audiences don’t need textbook or historical accuracy to love a movie. Still, it’s hard not to ask the question: could someone else make a better version of The Odyssey?
Enter Elon Musk and Mel Gibson: The $100 Million Hypothetical
On July 22, 2026, an X account posting under the handle “John Carter” floated an idea that X’s billionaire owner Elon Musk should hand Mel Gibson $100 million to direct a version of The Odyssey where the armor is forged to Bronze Age spec, the ships actually look seaworthy, and the characters speak nothing but Homeric Greek. Most wild pitches like that die a natural death on X. This one didn’t. It racked up 20,000 likes in eight hours. That figure says something about how many people were just waiting for someone to ask the question.
Musk himself replied with “I’m down.” That two-word reply, especially one that’s coming from someone who had spent the better part of the year calling Nolan’s film everything short of a crime, added fuel to an already raging social media inferno. And he wasn’t done either. That same day, Musk pinned a promise that his AI video generator, Grok Imagine, would produce its own full-length version of The Odyssey, one “true to the art of Homer.” Anyone who’s seen an AI-generated video knows how that usually goes, somewhere between impressive and that infamous AI clip of Will Smith eating Spaghetti.
Mel Gibson’s Playbook: Can He Actually Pull Off the Epic?
Strip away the meme value of Carter’s pitch for one second and there’s genuinely an interesting question about whether Mel Gibson can actually pull off the epic. There’s more to Homer’s The Odyssey than a bedtime story about a man who’s trying to find his way home. It’s also a story about war, violence, trauma, and a homecoming that ends with Odysseus slaughtering endless suitors in his own great hall. There aren’t many people in Hollywood who shoot that kind of violence better than the man behind Braveheart.
Nolan keeps his violence tidy and cerebral, all clean lines and quiet dread. Gibson, on the other hand, has forged a reputation for going for mud, torn cartilage, and the weight of a sword actually connecting with flesh. That’s the kind of brutality that made Braveheart’s battle scenes feel like they left bruises on the audience. He’d probably shoot that suitor massacre scene like the final scene of a horror movie, which is closer to what Homer wrote anyway. The real proof of concept, however, at least with regard to casting choices, is Apocalypto. Gibson cast Yucatec Maya speakers instead of recognizable Hollywood stars. Then, for the coup de grace, he shot the entire film in that language, and bet that subtitles alone could carry a mainstream audience for two hours.
His confidence stemmed from the fact that he’d already run the same language experiment in Aramaic and Latin in The Passion of the Christ. The film made over $600 million worldwide without a single word of English spoken anywhere in the movie. So, love him or hate him, Gibson is probably the only director alive who would commit a nine-figure budget to two hours of pure Homeric Greek dialogue and walk away with his head held high.
The Counter Perspective: The Irony of “Historical Accuracy”
The backlash around The Odyssey arrived before the movie even got audiences in seats. While this isn’t new to Hollywood, this time it arrived wrapped in some bizarre irony. Naysayers were demanding historical accuracy. The problem, though, is that the poem itself is not a historical text. It’s a myth passed down through centuries by bards who changed the details every time they told it around a fire, centuries before anyone bothered to write it down. Getting frustrated about things like skin tone for a story that features a witch who turns sailors into pigs feels like getting mad about Cinderella and her missing glass slipper.
Even the Coen brothers turned the same story into a Deep-South prison break comedy with George Clooney, and no one had a problem with that. Also, Gibson is probably the last person anyone wants to be asking to make a “historically accurate” movie. His Braveheart saw William Wallace don a kilt about 300 years before kilts existed. The movie also featured a Battle of Stirling Bridge without an actual bridge. But that’s not necessarily a stick to beat him with, since the man has never really been about delivering museum-grade precision in his movies. He has primarily been focused on producing movies that have the real feeling and weight of something ancient and brutal unfolding on screen. Brad Pitt strutted around in a leather mini skirt, and nobody organized a boycott over it. Maybe that’s what makes Gibson the right unhinged choice for Homer’s fairy tales, just not for the reasons Musk’s replies seem to think.
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