The first time I saw a film made in a machine instead of on a stage, I wasn’t surprised. I felt something more akin to sadness.
I should explain why, because everything I’m about to argue depends on it. I spent fifteen years on sets and in editing. I know the special silence of a crew at 4 a.m., everyone exhausted and somehow still searching for the same image. I know the feeling in the room when an actor finds something that was never on the page: a breath held, a line read that no one saw coming. That’s what I love. This is the thing I was afraid I would see disappear.
When generative AI became our part, I stood in the doorway with my arms crossed. The idea of an AI “actress” becoming a star scares me. The idea of an algorithm “governing” a film offends me. If you’ve ever felt like there’s silence on set at 4 a.m., the idea that a machine could replace that feels not only wrong, but like some kind of theft. I agree with everyone who felt that way. I still do that. I am one of them.
That’s why I never wanted to be the AI guy.
I have spent those fifteen years as an executive in the traditional independent model, helping to transition franchises to a similar model The consumables, Has Fallen, The killer’s bodyguard, RamboAnd Hell boy. I know what it takes to make a film. I also know what it costs: And I watched those margins shrink year after year until one day the math I had built my career on just didn’t work anymore. I desperately wanted to keep making films like I did in 2010, but it became clear that the industry that made that possible was on life support.
The thought that finally drove me to action was discouraging: If the people who know how to make films aren’t involved in developing these AI tools, the technology will be much further removed from the art we love. The technology is coming either way. The only thing that remains unclear is whose hands formed it.
We’ve seen the writing on the wall for years; Because of this, every other release is a sequel, a reboot, or something tied to the existing IP. A $35 million movie (what we used to call mid-budget) is now considered a reckless gamble. And when the cost of entry rises so high, the first thing that is lost is not the craft, but the courage to tell a new story.
That’s the true sacrifice, and it’s what keeps me up at night. Not budgets first, not even jobs first. originality First. Talented new voices are excluded before they even get a chance because no one can justify the risk of betting on them. We don’t know where the next Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao or Paul Thomas Anderson will come from. Under the model we have now, the honest and heartbreaking answer is that many of them will not come from anywhere at all. Their films simply don’t get made. We won’t know what we lost because we never saw it.
Lowering the barrier to entry is not a technical fantasy. This is the only way the industry can continue to produce the kind of work that made each of us fall in love with it in the first place.
I’m losing some people here, so let me be precise: the point of introducing AI into production is not to make films without humans. It’s about making films that couldn’t be financed by eliminating costs and friction in some parts of the pipeline that were never the soul of the work to begin with.
A film is made up of thousands of decisions, and most of them don’t concern the performance or the script. It involves iteration, coordination and the expensive effort of turning an idea into a finished framework. That’s where the waste and the savings live. Compress that, and a story that could have been told for only $40 million suddenly becomes viable at a fraction of the cost. That doesn’t diminish the art. It changes what gets the green light and for whom.
I’m not going to pretend the economics are easy. Anyone who says something like that is selling something. But fewer expensive films mean more films. More films means more shots on goal for new voices, and a healthier ecosystem means more opportunities. This is achievable if we put one line above all others: we do not hinder creativity. We protect it. The savings created by integrating AI workflows into the pre- and post-production process are used to pay storytellers better and enable studios to make bolder moves, not to push people out of the picture.
I’m not asking the industry to take any of this on faith. We have already proven that it is possible. My fellow producer Hank Hoffman and I developed Arcana, a production suite of generative AI tools to provide filmmakers and aspiring artists with a single, coherent system that carries a story from script to finished scene without losing narrative control, consistency, or production standards – and one that you can rely on to universally protect data and likenesses. In other models, these functions are spread across a dozen fragmented tools that don’t communicate. We got them to speak the same language, and we’ve already used this system to produce real films faster and with significantly fewer resources than traditional production.
In 2025 we received a SAG-AFTRA contract for our short film Echo hunter because we wanted to prove that it is possible to produce an AI-generated film with real people at the center, from actors to writers, directors, storyboard artists and composers. Screenplay and direction: Kavan the Kid, Echo hunter was one of the first successful attempts at the now emerging “Gray Stage/Gray Box” method. We physically filmed the actors’ voices and facial expressions and leveraged Arcana’s animation and visual effects capabilities. The film cost less than $50,000 to produce.
This SAG contract is the evidence of which I am most proud, because this entire thesis is worthless if it cannot be carried out in collaboration with the people whose work is affected by it. Echo hunter proves that AI tools and human creativity can coexist on terms the union can put its name to. The short film has nearly 500,000 views on YouTube, with countless comments shocked at the quality of what can be produced with AI. This project was eye-opening and precedent-setting, and it was a worthwhile endeavor to prove it could be done.
This is the part that the rest of the industry hasn’t fully reckoned with yet. Every studio and every platform faces the same decision. AI capabilities will inevitably be delivered in-house, and the question will be whether you spend years building these tools from scratch and learning the union landscape the hard way, or whether you integrate a platform that has already proven itself to be fluent in film and AI.
The ethos I want everyone in this industry to adhere to is artist-driven AI, not AI-driven art. Humans should be subject to the power of AI and never AI to the power of humans.
When people in Hollywood hear “AI,” they hear a platitudinous word for a dozen different things, and fear fills the gap. Part of the work ahead is simply education. We need to understand the nuances of separating the tools that empower creatives from those that would replace them—and loudly insist on the former.
I didn’t start an AI company to replace the people who make movies. I started doing this because I couldn’t watch the industry that employs them and that gave me the most magical experiences of my life collapse without a fight.
AI will change the world; Otherwise there is no serious argument. But how it changes Hollywood – how much, how quickly and on whose terms – is still up to us. I would rather we, as people who love this industry, make the decision together than wake up one morning and find that the decision was made for us.
Jonathan Yunger is a film producer who is currently president of Millennium Media and co-founder and CEO of Arcana Labs.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-moviemaking-production-1236647473/
