Fountain 0 Releases Nearly Fully AI-Generated Odysseus Film

Christopher Nolan is bringing to theaters the most expensive production of his career, the epic 'The Odyssey' starring Matt Damon, shot over seven months across seven countries for $250 million. A few days later, a different version of the same story will appear on the website of small studio Fountain 0: 'Odysseus: The Fall,' made almost entirely with generative AI models, with no actors, no set, and no cameras.

Same Story, Two Budgets

The director, screenwriter, and performer of Odysseus is Ash Koosha, an Iranian filmmaker and co-founder of Fountain 0, who used his own AI-generated likeness for the role. His brother and studio co-founder Pooya Koosha played Eurylochus the same way. The production used the likenesses of about a dozen people, including one professional actor and models working with the Fountain 0 network, which served as the starting point for the generated characters.

The release date of 'Odysseus: The Fall' is no accident. Fountain 0 plans to release the film 'later this summer,' right after the theatrical opening of Nolan's 'The Odyssey' on July 17. The filmmakers don't hide that they're counting on the wave of interest generated by the Hollywood premiere, though they insist they don't see it as competition.

We're really hoping that Christopher Nolan's film is a massive box office success, and that in some way our version of Odysseus's journey helps that success - Ash Koosha, director and co-founder of Fountain 0

How a Film Without a Set Was Made

Instead of actors, sets, and cameras, the entire film was built from computer-generated layers. According to Pooya Koosha, the visual core of every scene was generated by the Chinese video model Kling, while Fountain 0's proprietary software raised the quality of the raw footage to a level the studio describes as 'Hollywood-grade.' Some reports also point to the use of Google's image-generation tool Nanobanana, Claude for work on the script, and Gemini for research support, though Kling remains the common thread across all accounts.

We can't say enough good things about the Kling AI model, which we used to render the image for every scene - Pooya Koosha, producer and co-founder of Fountain 0

The script wasn't written in a traditional form, but as a set of notes and a story outline used to generate successive shots. Koosha describes the whole process as 'one person collaborating with artificial intelligence,' rather than a film automatically generated without a creator's involvement. The story portrays Odysseus's homecoming as the fragmented memories of a drowning man in his final minutes of life, in which every monster he encounters bears the features of his own handwriting.

Critics Call It AI Slop

Reactions after the trailer's release were mostly cold. Kotaku described the production outright as '135 minutes of Odyssey made from AI slop,' while PetaPixel judged that despite its flashy visuals, the film lacks a human element, pointing to typical flaws of generative video: characters changing appearance between scenes and inconsistent shapes among background extras.

A tool never made a film worth watching. Every such film was made by a person who had something urgent to say - Ash Koosha, director of 'Odysseus: The Fall'

Koosha pushes back against claims that his project is purely a technology demonstration, arguing that access to generative tools lowers the barrier to entry for creators without a studio budget. Tom Rogers, chairman of the board and executive producer of Fountain 0 (founder of CNBC), explains that the comparison with Nolan's budget was meant to give audiences a benchmark for how much AI can realistically support film production today.

Context for the Entertainment Industry

The story fits into a broader dispute over the place of artificial intelligence in filmmaking and acting, fueled in part by the controversy over the AI-generated 'actress' Tilly Norwood, criticized by the SAG-AFTRA union for devaluing human creative labor. Fountain 0's previous film, 'Dreams of Violets,' shown at the Tribeca festival, never found a theatrical or streaming distributor, which calls for caution about the new title's commercial prospects.

For Poland's production and advertising market, the cost difference is what speaks loudest: tens of thousands of dollars and three months of part-time work by one person, versus seven months of shooting across seven countries for a quarter of a billion dollars. Regardless of how one judges the artistic result, it shows that full-length AI-generated production has stopped being a purely theoretical scenario and is entering the market as a real, if still niche, product sold directly to viewers.