The first time I saw a film being put together inside a machine instead of on a stage, I wasn’t surprised. I felt something akin to sadness.
I have to explain why, because everything I’m going to discuss depends on it. I’ve spent fifteen years on sets and in editing spaces. I know the certain quiet of a crew at 4am, everyone exhausted and still somehow chasing the same shot. I know the feeling in the room when an actor finds something that wasn’t on the page before: a held breath, a line no one expected. This is the thing I love. This is the thing I was afraid to watch disappear.
So when generative AI became part of our lot, I was standing in the doorway with my arms crossed. The idea of an AI “actress” becoming a star terrifies me. The idea of an algorithm “directing” a movie bothers me. If you’ve ever felt like a quiet 4 a.m. while shooting, the idea that a machine could replace it seems not only wrong, but like a kind of theft. I agree with everyone who felt this way. I still do. I am one of them.
That’s why I never wanted to be an AI guy.
I spent those 15 years as an executive in the traditional independent model, helping to build franchises like that Expendables, He fell, The killer’s bodyguard, Ramboand Hellboy. I know what it takes to get a movie made. I also know the cost of it: I watched those margins shrink year after year until one day the math I’d built my career on stopped working. I desperately wanted to keep making films the way we did in 2010, but it became clear that the industry that made that possible was on life support.
The idea that finally moved me to action was daunting: If people who know how to make movies don’t get involved in developing these AI tools, the technology will be far removed from the art we love. Technology is coming in both directions. The only thing that has not yet been decided is whose hands will shape it.
We have seen the writing on the wall for many years; That’s why every other release is a sequel, reboot, or something stuck on an existing IP. A $35 million movie (what we used to call a mid-budget) is now being treated as a reckless gamble. When the cost of entry is that high, the first thing sacrificed is not craft, but the courage to tell a new story.
This is the real victim, the one that keeps me up at night. Not budgets first, nor even jobs first. authenticity Firstly. Talented new voices are eliminated before they get a chance, because no one can justify the risks of betting on them. We don’t know where the next Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, or Paul Thomas Anderson will come from. And with the model we have now, the honest and heartbreaking answer is that many of them will come from nowhere at all. Their films simply will not be produced. We will never know what we have lost, because we never saw it.
Lowering the barrier to entry is not a technical fantasy. It’s the only way the industry continues to produce the kind of work that made each of us fall in love with it in the first place.
This is where I lose some people, so let me be precise: the point of bringing AI into production is not to make films without people. It’s a film industry that was impossible to finance through cost cutting and friction from some parts of the pipeline that wasn’t the soul of the business to begin with.
A film is made up of thousands of decisions, and most of them are not the performances or the script. It’s the repetition, the coordination, and the exorbitant effort to turn an idea into a final framework. This is where waste and savings live. Press that, and a story that could have been told for just $40 million suddenly becomes viable at a fraction of the cost. This does not diminish the art. It changes what gets the green light, and for whom.
I will not pretend that economics is simple. Anyone who makes such a claim is selling something. But less expensive movies mean more movies. More films means more shots on goal for new voices, and a healthier ecosystem means more opportunities. This can be achieved if we draw one line above all others: we do not stifle creativity. We protect her. The savings gained from integrating AI workflows into the pre- and post-production process are there to pay storytellers better and empower studios to allow them to take braver twists, not to keep humans out of the frame.
I’m not asking the industry to take any of this on faith. We have already proven that it is possible. Fellow producer Hank Hoffman and I built Arcana, a production suite of generative AI tools, to give filmmakers and emerging artists a single, cohesive system that carries the story from script to final scene without losing narrative control, consistency, or production standards along the way — and a system you can trust is globally data and likeness protected. In other models, these capabilities are distributed across dozens of fragmented tools that do not communicate. We had them speak the same language, and in doing so, we actually used this system to produce real films faster, and with significantly fewer resources, than traditional production would allow.
In 2025, we received a SAG-AFTRA contract for our short film Eco Hunter Because we wanted to prove that it’s possible to make an AI-generated movie with real humans at the center, from the actors to the writer, director, storyboard artists and composer. Written and directed by Cavan the Kid, Eco Hunter It was among the first successful attempts at the now emerging “grey phase/grey box” method. We physically captured the actors’ voices and expressions and used Arcana’s animation and visual effects abilities. The film cost less than $50,000 to produce.
This SAG contract is the proof point that I’m most proud of, because this whole thesis is worthless if it can’t be done in partnership with the people whose work this impacts. Eco Hunter It proves that AI tools and human ingenuity can coexist on terms that the Federation can put its name on. The short film has received nearly 500,000 views on YouTube, with countless comments shocked at the quality of what can be produced using AI. This project was an eye-opener, set a precedent, and was a worthwhile undertaking to prove its feasibility.
This is the part that the rest of the industry has not yet fully taken into account. Every studio and platform is about to face the same decision. AI capabilities will inevitably come in-house, and the question will become whether you spend years building these tools from scratch and learning the syndication landscape the hard way, or integrating a platform that has already proven it can speak movies and AI fluently.
The ethos I ask everyone in this business to uphold is artist-driven AI, not AI-driven art. Humans should be as powerful as AI and AI should never be as powerful as humans.
When people in Hollywood hear the word “artificial intelligence,” they hear one trivial word for dozens of different things, and fear rushes in to fill the gap. Part of the work ahead of us is simply education. We must understand the nuance, separating the tools that empower creators from the tools that might replace them – and insist loudly on the former.
I didn’t create an AI company to replace the people who make movies. I started it because I couldn’t stand back and watch the industry employ them, and this gave me the most magical experience of my life, going down without a fight.
Artificial intelligence will change the world. There is no serious argument otherwise. But how does it change? Hollywood – How much, at what speed, on whose terms – we still have to decide. I would rather we decide it together, as people who love this industry, rather than wake up one morning and find it’s been decided for us.
Jonathan Younger is a producer Flamm is currently President of Millennium Media and Co-Founder and CEO of Arcana Labs.
