SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk says Grok, the AI system built by xAI, will be capable of generating full-length movies by the end of 2026. The prediction came as Musk shared an AI-generated trailer for Homer's "The Odyssey" on X, writing simply: "Full movies by the end of this year."
A trailer that turned heads
The clip, produced entirely with the newly released Grok Imagine Video 1.5 model, runs more than two minutes and reimagines the ancient epic as a 1970s-style Hollywood blockbuster. Created by filmmaker David Thompson, it strings together 36 remarkably consistent shots into a coherent narrative, from marching armies and charging chariots to close-ups of grief-stricken warriors aboard a rocking ship. The realism of the motion, lighting, and physics drew widespread attention, with many viewers struggling to believe a machine produced it. The model behind the trailer recently topped the AI video arena leaderboard.
From clips to cinema
Musk framed the milestone as a stepping stone. He has said AI-generated video would be "watchable" by the end of this year and "really good" by the end of 2027. Getting from polished two-minute trailers to feature-length films still requires solving hard problems, including narrative coherence across an entire runtime, the energy needed to render long sequences, and questions around training data and artistic intent.
But the pace of progress has been striking. Grok Imagine Video 1.5 generates synchronized audio in the same pass as the visuals and produces six-second 720p clips in about 25 seconds, a dramatic speedup over earlier models. xAI has been shipping rapid upgrades across its product line, momentum we tracked in our report on Grok 4.3 reaching general availability on Amazon Bedrock.
