The New Film Studio Where AI Does the Heavy Lifting, Not Hollywood
A startup called Promise has set up shop next to the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, and its filmmakers say they no longer need to get past those famous studio walls to bring ambitious films to life.
Key points
- Promise, a new AI-driven film studio, opened in Culver City, California in summer 2025, within sight of the historic Sony Pictures lot.
- The studio uses AI tools to generate backgrounds, visual effects and synthetic performers, cutting out the traditional studio middleman.
- Some of its production pipeline relies on Chinese AI models that its founders describe as market-leading.
- Supporters argue the technology will make mid-budget films financially possible again; critics worry about the ethics of synthetic performers.
- No major US legislation currently regulates the use of AI-generated performers in commercial film production.
Hollywood has high walls, literally and figuratively. Getting a film made through a major studio means pitching past layers of executives, fitting the mould of what has already made money, and splitting creative control along the way. Promise, a new production studio that opened this summer next to Sony Pictures' landmark Culver City campus in Los Angeles, is betting that AI makes those walls irrelevant.
The studio's team uses rapidly improving AI models to do work that once required enormous crews and budgets. Backgrounds are generated digitally. Special effects no longer demand a post-production house. Most strikingly, Promise works with what its founders call "synthetic performers," AI-generated characters that appear on screen in place of, or alongside, human actors.
Who does this affect first?
Mid-budget filmmakers feel it most immediately. This is the tier of film, typically costing between five million and fifty million dollars to produce, that the major studios largely abandoned after streaming reshaped the economics of the industry. The argument Promise and studios like it make is straightforward: if AI can replace a significant slice of production costs, projects that were previously unbankable become viable.
For working actors and crew, the picture is more complicated. Synthetic performers, AI-generated digital characters built to look and move like humans, sit at the centre of an ongoing labour dispute. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing American film and television performers, has pushed for rules requiring studios to obtain consent and pay residuals before using a performer's digital likeness. Those protections exist in some contracts, but no federal law in the United States currently mandates them across the board.
Promise's pipeline also draws on Chinese AI models. The studio's founders describe these tools as market-leading for certain visual tasks. That detail matters because US lawmakers have spent the past two years scrutinising American companies' reliance on Chinese technology, though no current rule bars a film studio from using it.
What does this mean for ordinary moviegoers?
For the audience, the near-term change is subtler than the headlines suggest. Films with AI-generated backgrounds and effects have already been in cinemas; most viewers did not notice. Synthetic performers are newer and less polished, but the technology is improving fast.
The deeper shift is in what gets made. If mid-budget drama, science fiction and genre film become cheaper to produce, more of them reach screens. Whether AI-assisted films carry the same creative texture as traditionally made ones is a question audiences will answer with their ticket choices.
As The Guardian AI reported, filmmakers at Promise can look across at the Sony lot from their far more modest offices. The irony is deliberate. The question now is whether the films that come out of places like this will be worth watching.
Common questions
Are synthetic performers the same as deepfakes?
Not exactly. A deepfake, a fake video or audio clip made with AI to impersonate a real, identifiable person without their consent, is typically made to deceive. Synthetic performers are AI-generated characters built for scripted storytelling, though the underlying technology overlaps and the ethical boundaries are still being drawn.
Does any law protect actors from having their likeness copied by AI?
In the United States, no federal law yet does this comprehensively. Some individual performer contracts negotiated by SAG-AFTRA include consent and payment clauses, but coverage is uneven and enforcement depends on the contract rather than statute.
