AI-Generated Feature ‘Odysseus: The Fall’ Unveiled as Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Hits Theaters

Fountain O, a new artificial intelligence-driven company launched to produce full-length AI generated films and TV series, has announced its second feature, Odysseus: The Fall.

Ash Koosha, creator of the earlier AI-generated Iranian resistance movie Dream of Violets that cost $2,000 to make and debuted at Tribeca, has returned with another live action tale budgeted at “mid-five figures” and based on the Greek hero Odysseus. Fountain O, unveiling the project on Tuesday, is looking to build audience buzz by piggy-backing on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey epic Greek epic adaptation budgeted at around $250 million for production and to hit theaters July 17.

“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,” Ash stated.

Nolan’s epic The Odyssey stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, whose long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War reunites him with his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). The cast also includes Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Travis Scott and Charlize Theron.

The AI-generated Odysseus: The Fall, at 135 minutes in length, in its own take on Odysseus’ journey home centers on “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes — a voyage that is really a trial, where every monster wears his own handwriting. Stripped of the word ‘clever,’ what remains is a man reckoning with what he actually did to get home. It ends where the songs never go: not with a hero’s welcome, but with forgiveness offered by the one person who knows exactly what he is,” a synopsis from Fountain O reads.

As with Dreams of Violets, actors, sets and cameras in Odysseus: The Fall were entirely replaced by AI models in its production. At the same time, the script, the images and the voicing of characters was done by Koosha using human creativity.

Koosha in a director’s statement argued storytellers should not feel threatened by AI tools. “It’s a threat to nothing except distance, the distance between a person with a story and the means to tell it. 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.”

Koosha and his producer Tom Rogers, a longtime tech and media executive (he founded CNBC while running NBC Cable), with Odysseus: The Fall are looking to promote their proprietary AI video production software.

Rogers, executive chairman of Fountain 0 and executive producer of Odysseus: The Fall, said while democratizing movie making by using AI tools and proprietary video production process, “we wanted to provide a basis of comparison in the same time frame with a movie (The Odyssey) coming from one of the world’s most revered directors, so moviegoers might be curious enough to see both films developed out of the same classic tale as a way to better understand the level at which AI is able to both contribute already to the art of filmmaking, and to increasing the amount of quality films that can be offered to the public”.

And Pooya Koosha, producer and post-producer of Odysseus: The Fall, pointed to the Chinese AI video generator software Kling in use to make the second Fountain O movie title after Sora AI video generation software — which similarly generates videos and short films from user prompts — was shuttered by OpenAI. Chinese AI tools are increasingly in use as companies look to reduce the cost of AI bills in manufacturing processes.

“We cannot offer enough praise for the AI model, Kling, which is what we used to develop the image rendering of every scene. We are finding through experimentation with each film that we are creating new tools and techniques enabling us to overcome challenges that put our filmmaking at the ultimate cutting edge of how an AI movie can be created at the same level of any human production,” Pooya Koosha said in his own statement.

The AI-generated feature also used Google Nanobanana for imagery and core frames, Claude AI for language related editing and Google Gemini for project research. The Fountain 0 proprietary tech was used for blocking actors, frame accuracy and world modeling.

The Koosha brothers were born in Iran and left the country in 2009. They’re also no strangers to cloud computing and AI technology, having founded Claigrid, a cloud AI personalization company with Tom Rogers as its executive chairman.

So far, no streamer or theatrical distributor has picked up Dreams of Violets for a commercial release after the Tribeca titles was shopped around. For now, Fountain O will make Odysseus: The Fall and Dreams of Violets available for viewers to stream via the Fountain O website and a $9.99 per-titled rental price.

Dreams of Violets will be available to stream on July 17, and Odysseus: The Fall will be available later this summer.