I wrote about David Ellison’s AI strategy, what the great AI freakout means for Hollywood and A24’s deal with Google DeepMind.
Prime Video is now streaming AI-generated television. Castle Walls, a two-episode melodrama from Turkish production company Ay Yapım, was built with AI doing much of the visual work, and Amazon has released it globally, alongside its “conventional” series and movies. Amazon has also acquired an AI-generated spinoff film of Ay Yapım’s hit crime series Çukur. In other words: A major streamer is now putting AI-made entertainment in front of a mass audience.
Not long ago, that would have been unthinkable. Hollywood used to have a neat little arrangement with AI: The machines could help make the movie, but they weren’t supposed to be the movie. AI could clean up a shot, generate a background or save a post-production team from an all-nighter. The idea that AI could generate the entertainment itself — and that a real studio or streamer might actually put its name on the result — was radioactive. Early AI video had the visual integrity of a fever dream, and the labor and legal questions were uglier still: Whose work trained the models? Who owned an actor’s face or voice? And when executives promised “efficiency,” how many people were about to discover that efficiency meant their jobs?
Amazon and others aren’t waiting for those questions to be settled. AI projects are emerging with recognizable talent, established production companies and major distributors attached. The business opportunity has simply gotten too tempting to keep hidden. AI is now coming in through two doors: Through the front, it’s moving from the software menu to the marquee, as on Prime Video; through the back, the route Ben Affleck and Netflix are taking, it’s settling into workflows largely out of sight. A third path runs through the financing: Antonio Banderas’ upcoming epic Cortés is betting AI can make it affordable to produce an expensive-looking movie.
Read on for a closer look at all three. I’ll get into which model eventually wins — and the counterintuitive problem all this production-cost solving could make worse…
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