The Setup
Right, so somewhere between the Grand Prix and the last yacht party of the season, something rather enormous happened in the film world, and almost nobody in Monaco noticed because we were all too busy admiring hulls. Artificial intelligence has learned to make films. Not “make films” the way your nephew makes films with a drone and too much confidence – actual, proper, cinematic, someone-might-cry-at-this films. And having spent a week falling down this rabbit hole, I can report: it’s brilliant, it’s chaotic, and it’s coming to a screening room near the Casino faster than you think.
From Fever Dream to Fast Lane
Let’s rewind. Three years ago, AI video looked like a fever dream shot through a shower curtain – four seconds of a horse that occasionally became a dog. Then Sora arrived in 2024 and suddenly the horse stayed a horse. Now we’ve got Veo, Kling, Seedance – models that hand you sound, physics, and camera moves that don’t look like they were operated by a toddler on roller skates. Someone built an entire production studio around this – Higgsfield, currently the loudest name in the room – and their Cinema Studio now does everything from script to color grade in one place, like a Formula 1 pit crew but for making a movie instead of changing a tyre in two seconds flat. Their short film Kök Börü premiered at SIGGRAPH this year next to actual Pixar and Disney work, which is roughly the cinematic equivalent of a garage team beating Ferrari at Monaco. I love that. Everyone should love that.
The Wobbly Wheel
Now, is it perfect? Absolutely not, and here’s where I get to be delightfully grumpy about something I secretly adore. The industry’s biggest headache is “character consistency” – AI’s charming habit of making your hero look subtly different in every single shot, like a stunt double swapped mid-sentence. Give it a few more scenes and your leading lady has had unscheduled facial surgery. It’s the same problem every new technology has: early cars used to randomly lose a wheel. Nobody said “well, cars are finished then.” They fixed the wheel. And they’re fixing this too – reference frames, personal character models, humans doing the final polish – the wobble is shrinking fast.
Already in the Cinema, Whether You Clocked It or Not
And it’s not staying in the lab, though it’s not always a smooth ride either. Critterz, a proper animated feature backed by OpenAI, was meant to premiere at Cannes this year – then OpenAI switched off the very tool the film was built on, and the whole thing missed its own party. The producers are now shopping it round Cannes anyway and hunting for a new tech partner, aiming for early 2027 instead. Which, if anything, is a rather good metaphor for the whole AI-film moment: thrilling, occasionally the rug gets pulled from under you, and everyone gets back up and keeps filming. Meanwhile Hollywood’s already quietly using AI everywhere and just not mentioning it at the afterparty: de-aging Harrison Ford, swapping stunt faces in Shang-Chi, smoothing an accent in The Brutalist – that last one caused such a stink at Oscar season you’d think someone had reversed into a parked Bugatti. People don’t mind AI touching their movies. They mind finding out afterwards. Fair enough, really.
Meet the Garage Teams
Then there’s the studio scene, and it’s got genuine character. 2HRZ runs on the tagline “The world does not need more content. It needs better stories” – and with their full screenplay-to-color-grade pipeline, they can afford to tell any story – from Scandinavian horror to Japanese psycho-catastrophe. Asteria, co-founded by Natasha Lyonne, is playing the “ethical AI” card and just launched an entire production operating system. Wonder Studios wants to be the A24 of artificial intelligence, which is either the best or most terrifying sentence written this year, possibly both.
Where the Road’s Headed
Here’s my actual point, delivered without a hint of sarcasm: this isn’t a novelty act. AI film tools are about to become a button inside every platform you already use, the way spell-check just quietly lives inside your phone. The line between “studio” and “app” is dissolving in real time.
So no, this isn’t the death of cinema, whatever the doom-mongers on the Croisette are muttering into their rosé. It’s a new kind of engine under the bonnet, it’s a bit temperamental in cold weather, and it’s about to take film-making somewhere genuinely exciting. Buckle up. Ideally in something with a good stereo.
By Alex Chapsky for HelloMonaco
