Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been in cinemas for more than three months, and somehow it is still going. Universal’s epic earned an estimated $3.2 million internationally over the weekend, taking its overseas total to roughly $1.169 billion and its worldwide haul to an estimated $1.794 billion.

That would be an extraordinary result for any film, never mind an almost three-hour, R-rated adaptation of a roughly 3,000-year-old Greek epic. The Odyssey has already overtaken Deadpool & Wolverine to become the highest-grossing R-rated film ever and has become both Nolan’s biggest film and Universal’s highest-grossing release.

The Odyssey’s Box Office Run Is Almost Absurd

The theatrical staying power of Nolan’s film deserves almost as much attention as the $1.794 billion total. By its 15th weekend, The Odyssey was still adding millions internationally. Its global progression tells the story: roughly $1.3 billion by weekend five, $1.55 billion by weekend seven, $1.69 billion by weekend nine and now nearly $1.8 billion.

Part of it appears to be old-fashioned word of mouth. People see the film, tell somebody else it needs to be experienced in a cinema, and the cycle continues.

There is also something particularly clever about Nolan adapting The Odyssey. Nobody is rushing to see it because they are terrified somebody on social media will spoil what happens to Odysseus. The story has survived for thousands of years.

Instead, the selling point is the experience itself. That is also why the long theatrical window matters. Nolan has consistently fought for his films to remain exclusive to cinemas for longer, and Universal has allowed The Odyssey room to keep earning rather than rushing it onto digital platforms.

Audiences are still seeking out IMAX screenings months after release. Some have quite literally been waiting for suitable seats or screenings to become available.

Then there is Grok’s Odyssey, and this is where the exercise becomes impossible to separate from the culture war Elon Musk helped manufacture around Nolan’s film in the first place.

Before The Odyssey even opened, Musk repeatedly attacked Nolan’s casting. He amplified a racially charged post insulting Lupita Nyong’o, accused Nolan of being an “anti-White racist,” and boosted posts mocking Elliot Page, including transphobic attacks based on false claims about Page’s role. The attacks spread across right-wing social media, where diversity itself became evidence that Nolan had betrayed Homer.

Then the film opened, and despite his vitriol, audiences embraced it. The supposedly “woke” blockbuster marched towards $1.8 billion worldwide.

Musk’s answer was not to reconsider the premise. It was to promise an AI-generated Odyssey he called “historically accurate” and “true to the art of Homer.” It looks terrible and was historically inaccurate.

That is the irony. After all the sneering about diversity supposedly ruining art, the proposed corrective is synthetic actors, synthetic voices and synthetic performances. If the obsession with removing Black and trans performers from a story ends with replacing human performers altogether, who exactly is that victory supposed to serve?

White actors do not benefit from a future in which studios can replace them with generated bodies any more than Black or trans actors do. This is the cultural equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face. The people chanting “go woke, go broke” may discover that the technology they celebrate as a way to remove people they dislike does not stop at the people they dislike.

Automation does not have a racial loyalty. It does not care whether the actor whose job disappears is black, white, trans or straight. That is why Musk’s role deserves more scrutiny than another round of jokes about a bad AI video. xAI raised $20 billion this year to expand the infrastructure behind Grok and Grok Imagine, giving Musk-backed systems enormous resources to develop and distribute this technology.

When someone with that level of capital, platform reach and technological power repeatedly frames Black and trans inclusion as something that needs correcting, then builds tools capable of manufacturing an alternative version without those performers, the concern is not that one seven-minute clip is going to replace Christopher Nolan.

The concern is what kind of media ecosystem those tools could help normalise. Black people and trans people simply existing on screen should not be treated as a political provocation. Technology should not become a convenient way to engineer them out of culture.

Nolan’s Odyssey is approaching $1.8 billion because audiences are responding to performances, scale, craft, emotion and the collective work of thousands of human beings. Grok can imitate the surface of cinema. What it has not demonstrated is that removing the humans makes the art any better.

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