‘I see the incredible promise’: on set of an AI film shoot as new studios embrace controversial tech
Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them bypass studio giants and take more creative risks
Near the collonaded entrance to Sony Pictures’ historic Culver City film studio, a tech-powered rival has sprung up this summer. The artists at Promise, a new studio feeding off the potential of AI, can glimpse the lots where Singin’ in the Rain and Men in Black were shot, but no longer do they need to get beyond the studio’s high walls to make their visions come true.
From far more modest premises, they are making movies with rapidly accelerating AI models that create backgrounds, special effects and even “synthetic performers” – using US models but also driven by market-leading Chinese AI.
Backed by Google, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Disney, Promise is one of a rising number of AI film studios now taking root in Hollywood, with the result that traditional studios’ vast sound stages and financing are becoming less necessary.
It is a controversial trend. Leading directors including Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro have criticised generative technology, actors and writers are fearing for their jobs, and the Democratic congresswoman Laura Friedman, who represents Hollywood’s actors, writers and directors, warned last month: “We can’t wait until we see tens of thousands of American workers displaced.”
But the excitement and energy about AI’s potential was palpable this week at Promise’s new base when a human actor, Tori Thomas, waited for her call amid rows of computers for early shooting on the studio’s newly announced AI-enabled horror film, Touch Grass, with a budget in the low millions of dollars.
The sound stage was little more than a corner of the office hung with white sheets. A small camera followed Thomas as she scrambled in a chase scene, then the AI did the rest. It superimposed her movement in real time on to a field of swaying grass generated by a Chinese AI model, Seedance 2.5, released this month, which looks set to dramatically slash production times.
Whole scenes – actor and backdrop – were instantly visible on the director’s handheld monitor, as if they were filming in real locations. Even the seedheads in the AI-generated meadow moved as Thomas appeared to brush past. In another take, the field was easily replaced by a nightmarish underground cavern. With a glance at the screen, Thomas could immediately see the backdrop she was acting with.
Promise is not alone in embracing the technology, which Netflix last week said it had used in 300 of its 1,000 titles in 2026. Ron Howard, the veteran director of the Da Vinci Code and A Beautiful Mind, is set to release an AI-enabled animated documentary feature about prisoners of war in Vietnam, working with another new AI studio, Obsidian. Brad Pitt said this week that while there was a lot of pushback, “AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, $40m- to $90m-budgeted films, get made.”
That chimed with predictions from a new wave of AI native film-makers, such as Kavan “the Kid” Cardoza, 37, who has set up the Phantom X studio. He predicted a creative renaissance circumventing the studio giants not seen since Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee’s breakthroughs more than 30 years ago.
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The Promise shoot involved veteran film-makers including Joel Hynek, an Oscar winner who worked on the manual special effects for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 action-horror film Predator.
“When we went from optical to digital film, we thought we’d gone to heaven,” he told the Guardian. “It’s like that again. So many things are easy to do. I am an embracer of AI. Some people are wary of it, a little afraid of it, but I see the incredible promise.”
Others, like Nolan, voice concern. “I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly, so completely rejected by the public,” the Odyssey director has said. “Everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people.”
There has been a backlash against an AI resurrection of the late actor Val Kilmer to star in a new feature and the emergence of the AI “actor” Tilly Norwood, with the actor Emily Blunt calling it “really, really scary” and pleading: “Please stop taking away our human connection.”
But the new AI studios are undeterred. Dave Clark, the director of Promise’s Touch Grass – who is also working on an animation, Hardcore 94, set to an early 1990s LA hip-hop soundtrack – said that with “great dialogue and backstory”, AI-generated characters could become interesting and believable.
The US actors’ union Sag-Aftra will no doubt beg to differ, but Cardoza predicted: “Next year [AI actors will] be just as good as real actors.”
George Strompolos, a co-founder and the chief executive of Promise, estimated that hybrid AI films – human actors alongside AI technology – would prove 20% to 50% cheaper than conventional production. That could free film-makers from requiring major studio investment.
“We’re at the beginning of a golden era of independent, highly empowered creative companies – call them small studios, micro studios – that will lead to more creative risk-taking,” he said.
Joanna Popper, a producer and an adviser on AI to production companies, said the positive view on AI in film and TV was that it “empowers anybody with a talent and a discipline for storytelling to be able to go make what they want to make”. But she said: “The concern is … if five tech companies suck all of the financial gain out of the industry.”
Imagine, the 41-year-old studio run by Howard and Brian Grazer, now has an AI studio, Obsidian, operating from space in its Beverly Hills HQ. It has partnered with Obsidian to make The Code, an AI-enabled, Howard-directed animated feature based on drawings made in Vietnamese captivity by US prisoners of war.
D Ryan Reeb, an executive producer at Obsidian, estimated the technology delivered a 30% to 40% cost saving. He said he had met with dozens of top production companies interested in the technology and predicted all would use it. But AI in Hollywood has drawn comparison to plastic surgery: everyone’s doing it but nobody wants to talk about it. “It’s 100% like that,” Reeb said.
An AI native film-maker such as Cardoza, who makes films in his spare bedroom in Playa Vista, has no reason to downplay his AI use. It has helped him reach 28m YouTube views for his Chronicles of Bone fantasy universe series launched online last autumn, featuring his versions of Robin Hood, Peter Pan, King Arthur and Tinkerbell and a lucrative deal with the Magnific AI platform. Cardoza believes AI film-makers are attracting audiences because, ironically, their direct authorial voice has greater authenticity than in Hollywood where “they turn writing into algorithms”.
“I’ve had meetings with studios where [they say] a horror movie has to have X amount of jump scares … Why can’t I just write the story? And if there’s two jump scares, there’s two. If there’s 10, there’s 10. Why are we hitting markers? That’s not creativity – that’s manufacture.”
He said the growth in AI-led film-making “reminds me more of the 90s era when you got Tarantino, [Robert] Rodriguez and all these guys popping off … You put on any one of their movies and you will know that it’s theirs without their name being shown because of the style and voice.” Now, he said, films in cinemas “all look the same”.
Cardoza highly rates the models made by Chinese tech companies who are “smoking everybody on everything – the image generation models, the video generation models.”
He assumes the Chinese models are so powerful because they have been “trained on everything under the sun”, in a way that US models cannot be because of intellectual property restrictions. But with Washington considering restrictions on Chinese open-ch have allowed him a creative flourishing
“I’ll move to China,” he said. “I’m not even lying.”
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- AI (artificial intelligence)
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