AI Moves From Hollywood Tool to Hollywood Studio

AI is moving deeper into Hollywood, not just as a tool, but as the foundation for an entirely new kind of studio. Promise is an AI native studio betting that the tech can fundamentally reshape how entertainment gets made, and its CEO and cofounder, Strompolos, joins us now. What is an AI native studio, George? Let's start with the basics. Great question, Ed. So, you know, the advent of generative AI has enabled creators to have 10 x superpowers, and we sought out to build a company around these new types of creators. They are leveraging all the best models to produce original films and series at a fraction of the traditional cost and timeline. You know, I I think back just even maybe last year, about three years ago, discussing the the basic premise. And for lots of people, the dream was the prompt results in a feature film coming out the other side. Is that a reality now? We're we're talking about something very specific. You know, this is an artist led process. You know, of course, when you open up an AI model, you can prompt something and get a result. Models are good for shots. Studios are good for producing films and series, and it's a collaborative process. It brings together artistry from character designers to environmental designers to visual effects artists and, of course, great storytellers. So a lot of the roles you would see in traditional filmmaking process are still there, but what's possible now is for smaller teams to do high impact work. I guess another way of of pushing you on it, George, is to ask, what is it that you do differently to a a traditional Hollywood studio? How is the setup different? You know, if you look back at the history of entertainment, there have been these technological shifts that have changed how the business works. We think there's no doubt that the advent of generative AI will be another one of them. So we are really rethinking the business from first principles, from how ideas are shaped, developed, and tested all the way through to production, postproduction, and even how they're brought to audiences. But is it like, you know, somebody has a script? That's how this town works. Right? Somebody has a script. Gotta have a to you and they say, here you go. You know, we What happens then? Well, we do collaborate with incredible writers in in Hollywood as well as storytellers who haven't had their haven't had their moment yet. And one thing that we do that's quite different, Ed, is we make the last thing first. Here's what I mean by that. Typically, if you're making a film, one of the last things you do is produce the trailer. In our world, once we have the story, the script, the the idea developed, we actually go straight to a trailer or a proof of concept so we can see the story leap off the page. You can get a sense of how it's gonna look, feel, and sound. Let... Let's take that trailer. Let's say it's three minutes long, ninety seconds. How much of that product is AI generated? How much of it is not. That's the bit that I think people are trying to understand. In our case, we leverage, generative media for a large portion of the process. It sort of depends on what type of project you're talking about. At promise, we're focused on animation. We're also focused on what's called hybrid. Hybrid is human performance in synthetic environments. And what that does is it serves to bring down the cost of visual effects and allowing smaller films to have great scope and scale. Okay. That's where I want to go. So you talked about, you know, when there is a technological shift, it changes an industry. Yeah. Let's get to sort of the economic change. Sure. You know, is this the the case that the the production process of of a a feature film or a television series isn't... Is lowered, through through how you set yourselves up through the technology. Yeah. This is actually about a reduction in cost and timeline. In the animated side, we're seeing cost reductions in the 50% plus for certain productions. Now that's not to say every animated project needs to follow this methodology. But in our case, we see that as an opportunity to bring new stories to life that weren't possible before. So that that, you know, that's a saving for the industry. How does that manifest as business for you? You know, what what what makes working with you, George, attractive? We think that it creates a new opportunity to shift the paradigm. So if we were setting out to produce an animated feature in the past, that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years and years and years. Now with a reduced cost, we can produce that ourselves. We can own that, and we can seek the distribution that we need for such projects. So many stories that weren't told before are now going to be unlocked. Super interested in in the back story, backing from Andreessent Hordern, Google's, AI futures fund, kinda incubated by by Disney. You're you're you're growing a start up. Is that fair? Yeah. We're... This is absolutely a start up. We're a two year old company. We've been deep in r and d, building the the structure of what we think a studio should look like in the modern era. We've been fortunate to bring on great partners that you've mentioned. We participated in the Disney Accelerator, which is how they engage with new innovative companies. They've been a tremendous partner. Really excited about collaborating with them. And, you know, we're now entering into the production phase. So we're in production this week on a hybrid horror series, which is, has the scope and scale of a massive budget, series, but is actually done again at a fraction of the cost and timeline with an incredible crew of artists as well as AI artists that help bring the story to life.