An AI version of Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem on a budget in just a couple of thousand dollars. This occurred just a day prior to Christopher Nolan’s star-studded $250 million film “The Odyssey” invading theaters.
In the recent update, the trailer of Odyssey: The Fall was dropped on YouTube on Tuesday, July 14. An opening frame of $85 million-$100 million domestic, with another $110M overseas in 73 territories and 22,700 screens for a global start that’s bound to be $200M+.It is stated that this is the same set of markets Uni launched Oppenheimer in, though Italy and Greece are going day-and-date this time.
The goal is not to compete with Nolan’s film, which opens Friday, July 17, but to showcase emerging AI technology and its ability to respond quickly to current cultural talking points, according to a statement by Fountain O co-founder and the film’s director Ash Koosha. Everything seen visually is an AI creation, though humans wrote the script, “directed” the film using prompts, and voiced the characters.
“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey, is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha said.
Read More: Christopher Nolan defends human creativity over AI ahead of The Odyssey release.
Fountain O is headquartered in London, where Koosha lives. Brother and co-founder Pooya Koosha is based in Menlo Park, where he is also the chief technology officer and co-founder of Claigrid, which builds AI infrastructure. The two were born in Iran and left in 2009.
“Odysseus: The Fall,” which is said to have cost “five figures,” was produced by Tom Rogers, a tech and media executive who founded CNBC and is executive chairman of Claigrid. The AI film arrives on the heels of an audiobook of Homer’s creation narrated by the AI-generated voice of Michael Caine developed by ElevenLabs.
Fountain O’s first film, “Dream of Violets,” was an AI depiction of mass protests in Iran in January that killed thousands of citizens. It cost $2,000 and debuted at the Tribeca Festival last month. It will debut on Fountain O’s website on Friday. Ash Koosha said the movie industry shouldn’t fear AI but embrace it. “It’s a threat to nothing except distance, the distance between a person with a story and the means to tell it,” he said in a statement. “More films will be made this way; that seems certain to me, the way it was certain once that anyone would be able to shoot on the camera in their pocket. What has to survive the change is the only thing that ever mattered: the story and the reason for telling it.
“A tool has never made a film worth watching. A person with something urgent to say has made every one of them, and that won’t change, whatever they’re holding when they say it.”
On the other hand, the UK, a lucrative Nolan market, is in the running, and the England-Argentina semifinal is on Wednesday. Should England make it to Sunday’s final, does Odysseus fall to his knees? Sources believe audiences will find the movie on an off-World Cup day (Oppenheimer in reported B.O. opened to $13.9M in the UK and legged out to $75M+), not to mention they’ve already bought their tickets in advance; read four IMAX 70MM sites in Europe went on sale a year out at the BFI IMAX London and London Science Museum. Sellouts a year ago also include the Melbourne Museum IMAX and the Oskar Imax Plaza in Prague.