In addition to Nolan’s, this year another Odyssey will be released: a 13-hour audiobook narrated by the voice of Michael Caine cloned with AI.

It was done by the AI company ElevenLabs and yes, Michael Caine has given consent to clone his voice and no, the audiobook has nothing to do with the film.

Evidently, 2026 is the year of theOdyssey. On July 17, Christopher Nolan’s film will be released, which has been talked about – and debated – continuously for at least a year. It could be the start of a trend, the Wet Hot Homeric Summer, with creators and influencers who, after watching the film, become obsessed and want to know more, discover how faithful Nolan’s adaptation is (the right amount, we already know), and what changes have been made between the poem and the screenplay. It must be in anticipation of this surge in demand for epic content – literally and literarily – that Eleven Labs has decided to create an audiobook version of the Odyssey.

The first part of this latest adaptation is already available on the ElevenReader, 24 chapters all between 20 and 30 minutes. That may seem like a lot, but in reality, it’s few, considering the entire audiobook is 13 hours long. Probably that’s why ElevenLabs decided to have one of the most charismatic voices around narrate this audiobook: that of Michael Caine. This sentence you just read should be taken exactly as you read it, though: ElevenLabs did not assign Michael Caine the task of narrating this Odyssey, they actually decided to use the actor’s voice and nothing else, without involving any other “piece” of Caine’s work. How did they manage this? But with AI, of course: the company – with the actor’s consent, which is by no means a given considering various unpleasant precedents – “cloned” Caine’s voice and used it as the narrator of the audiobook, completing the recordings in just six weeks.

ElevenLabs deserves some credit for manipulating the hype, though. The choice of Caine – of his voice, actually, but you get the point – as the narrator of theOdyssey is certainly not random: Caine is one of Nolan’s favorite actors, and since it was announced that the director’s next film would be an adaptation of the Homeric poem, fans have wondered what role the actor could have in this adaptation. Well, thanks to ElevenLabs we know: none, Caine will not be in Nolan’s Odyssey . But if he had been, the voice he would have performed with would have been exactly the same as the one narrating the Odyssey of ElevenLabs, so all the fans disappointed by Caine’s absence in Nolan’s Odyssey can console themselves by listening to Caine’s voice in the Odyssey of ElevenLabs. The curious fact is that the two projects, the film and the audiobook, are in no way connected. But, whether it’s a coincidence or not, the cover of the audiobook strongly resembles some images from the film, particularly the figure at the center of this cover is practically identical to the Agamemnon from Nolan’s film, starting with the much-criticized helmet designed by the director.

Regardless of how the audiobook will be – anyone who has the strength and time to listen to all 13 hours let us know how it is – it must be acknowledged that marketing ElevenLabs is truly capable. Perhaps that’s also why they use AI?