The first time I saw a film come together inside a machine instead of on a stage, I didn’t feel wonder. I felt something closer to grief.

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I should explain why, because everything I’m about to argue depends on it. I have spent fifteen years on sets and in edit bays. I know the specific quiet of a crew at 4 a.m., everyone exhausted and somehow still chasing the same shot. I know the feeling in the room when an actor finds something that was never on the page: a held breath, a line read no one saw coming. That is the thing I love. That is the thing I was afraid I was watching 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 film offends me. If you’ve ever felt that 4 a.m. quiet on set, the notion that a machine could replace it feels not just wrong, but like a kind of theft. I agreed with everyone who felt that way. I still do. I am one of them.

That’s why I never wanted to be the AI guy.

I spent those fifteen years as an executive in the traditional independent model, helping make franchises like The Expendables, Has Fallen, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Rambo, and Hellboy. I know what it takes to get a movie made. I also know what it costs: and I watched those margins shrink year after year until one day the math I’d built a career on simply stopped working. I desperately wanted to keep making movies the way we did in 2010, but it became clear that the industry that made that possible is on life support.

The thought that finally had me taking action was daunting: if the people who know how to make movies aren’t involved in the development of these AI tools, the technology will be that much more removed from the art we love. The technology is coming either way. The only thing still undecided is whose hands shape it.

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for years; it’s why every other release is a sequel, a reboot, or something stapled to existing IP. A $35 million film (what we used to call mid-budget) is now treated as a reckless gamble. And when the cost of entry climbs that high, the first thing sacrificed isn’t the craft — it’s the courage to tell a new story.

That’s the real casualty, and it’s the one that keeps me up at night. Not budgets first, not even jobs first. Originality first. Talented new voices get shut out before they ever get a shot, because no one can justify the risk of betting on them. We don’t know where the next Ryan Coogler or Chloé Zhao or Paul Thomas Anderson is going to come from. Under the model we have now, the honest and heartbreaking answer is that a lot of them won’t come from anywhere at all. Their films simply won’t get made. We won’t know what we’ve lost, because we’ll never have seen it.

Lowering the barrier to entry isn’t a tech fantasy. It’s the only way the industry keeps producing the kind of work that made every one 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 movies without people. It’s to make movies that were impossible to fund by taking cost and friction out of some parts of the pipeline that were never the soul of the work to begin with.

A film is thousands of decisions, and most of them aren’t the performance or the script. They’re iteration, coordination, the expensive churn of turning an idea into a finished frame. That’s where the waste, and the savings, lives. Compress that, and a story that could only have been told for $40 million suddenly becomes viable at a fraction of the cost. That doesn’t shrink the art. It changes what gets greenlit, and for whom.

I won’t pretend the economics are simple. Anyone who makes such a claim is selling something. But less expensive films mean more films. More films mean more shots on goal for new voices, and a healthier ecosystem means more opportunity. This is achievable if we hold one line above all others: we do not impede the creativity. We protect it. The savings gained from integrating AI workflows into the pre- and post-production process exist to pay the storytellers better and empower studios to let them take braver swings, not to cut human beings out of the frame.

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I’m not asking the industry to take any of this on faith. We have already proven it’s possible. My fellow producer Hank Hoffman and I built Arcana, a production suite of generative AI tools, to give filmmakers and budding artists a single coherent system that carries a story from script to finished scene without losing narrative control, consistency, or production standards along the way – and one that you can trust is universally safeguarding data and likeness. In other models, those capabilities are scattered across a dozen fragmented tools that don’t communicate. We made them speak the same language and in doing so, we’ve already used that system to produce real films faster, and with dramatically fewer resources, than traditional production allows.

In 2025, we secured a SAG-AFTRA contract for our short film Echo Hunter because we wanted to prove it was possible to produce an AI-generated film with real humans at the center, from actors to writer, director, storyboard artists, and composer. Written and directed by Kavan the Kid, Echo Hunter was among the first successful attempts at the now-rising “gray stage/gray box” method. We physically shot the actors’ voices and expressions and utilized Arcana’s capabilities for animations and visual effects. The film cost under $50,000 to produce.

That SAG contract is the proof point I am most proud of, because this entire thesis is worthless if it can’t be done in partnership with the people whose work this affects. Echo Hunter proves AI tools and human creativity can coexist on terms the union can put its name on. The short film has almost 500,000 views on YouTube, with a myriad of comments shocked at the quality of what can be produced with AI. This project opened eyes and set a precedent, and it was a worthwhile undertaking to prove it could be done.

That’s the part the rest of the industry hasn’t fully reckoned with yet. Every studio and platform is about to face the same decision. AI capabilities are inevitably coming in-house, and the question will become whether you spend years building these tools from scratch and learning the union landscape the hard way, or integrate a platform that has already proven they can speak film and AI fluently.

The ethos I’d ask everyone in this business to hold onto is artist-driven AI, not AI-driven art. It should be humans to the power of AI and never AI to the power of humans.

When people in Hollywood hear “AI,” they hear one flattening word for a dozen different things, and fear rushes in to fill the gap. Part of the work ahead is simply education. We must understand the nuance, separating the tools that empower creatives from the ones that would replace them – and insisting, loudly, on the former.

I didn’t start an AI company to replace the people who make films. I started it because I couldn’t stand by and watch the industry that employs them, and that gave me the most magical experiences of my life, collapse without a fight.

AI is going to change the world; there’s no serious argument otherwise. But how it changes Hollywood — how much, how fast, and on whose terms — is still ours to decide. I would rather we decided it together, as people who love this industry, than wake up one morning and find it was decided for us.

Jonathan Yunger is a film producer who currently serves as president at Millennium Media and the co-founder & CEO of Arcana Labs. 

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