Just when you thought the holiday season couldn’t arrive any earlier this year, here comes an AI-generated Christmas movie.
Titled “Merry the Christmas Witch,” it’s based on a children’s book and will inspire awe in its young audience about the magic of the holidays — through ghoulish and uncanny AI imagery (you can see footage here). The film — which currently has no distributor — cost $1.5 million to make, but its director brags that using AI actually saved him tens of millions of dollars.
“We would never have gotten a movie like ‘Merry’ made if we didn’t take that chance,” Tom Walsh, CEO of the indeopendent production company TW3 Entertainment, and who directed and co-wrote the film, told Variety.
According to Walsh, when he was inspired to make a movie out of author Bobbi Hess’s original book, he realized that it would cost $80 million to make. An “unknown property” like this one would be a hard sell to studios, he explained.
