‘Merry the Christmas Witch’ Director Estimated Movie Would Cost $80 Million — but Says With AI, He Made It for $1.5 Million (EXCLUSIVE)

‘Merry the Christmas Witch’ Director Estimated Movie Would Cost $80 Million — but Says With AI, He Made It for $1.5 Million (EXCLUSIVE) hakkında magazin dünyasında yaşanan en son ayrıntılar ve sıcak gelişmeler netleşti. Oct 12, 2026 9:37am PT ‘Merry the Christmas Witch’ Director Estimated Movie Would Cost $80 Million — but Says With AI, He Made It for $1.5 Million (EXCLUSIVE) By Corbin Bolies Plus Icon Corbin Bolies Latest ‘Merry the Christmas Witch’ Director Estimated Movie Would Cost $80 Million — but Says With AI, He Made It for $1.5 Million (EXCLUSIVE) 2 hours ago Antonio Banderas to Star in AI-Powered Feature ‘Cortes’ From Utopai Studios 4 hours ago ‘Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos’ Ordered to Series at Paramount+ 3 days ago See All AI has come for docudramas , for summer blockbusters , even for adaptations of books about farts . What’s left other than holiday films?

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Enter “ Merry the Christmas Witch .” The film focuses on Merry, the first witch born on Christmas Day, who must defeat a coven of evil witches that has kidnapped Santa Claus in a bid to destroy Christmas. The project is based on a 2012 children’s book by Bobbi Hess, a 70-year-old New Orleans-based technical writer who, in her own words, called the adaptation “a perfect marriage” of subject and technology.

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Related Stories Marvel’s ‘Zodiac’ Sets 2028 Release on Disney+ as New Details Revealed Marvel’s ‘X-Men ’97’ Season 3 Teaser Debuts at New York Comic-Con “AI enhanced the whole idea,” Hess tells Variety . “It was created by a human — the character Merry was created by me — but then Tom, with his amazing imagination and his wonderful ability to create wonderful creatures, it just came together.” The “Tom” in question is Tom Walsh, the CEO of the independent production company TW3 Entertainment, who directed and co-wrote the adaptation.

Walsh came across Hess’ book in 2014 during a Los Angeles meeting with her late husband, who gave Walsh a copy of her book. Walsh tells Variety he loved the idea of a Christmas witch and was eager to adapt the title.

But when he sat down to figure out the budget, the total cost seemed unwieldy: $80 million, a cost studios would balk at for “an unknown property,” Walsh said. Instead, using AI, he managed to produce the final two-hour film for $1.5 million, perhaps serving as a test case for the types of projects AI can help make.

“We were kind of stuck,” he says. “The doors are not very open to new kind[s] of ideas and new kind[s] of stories and everything, and that makes it a little tough for independent filmmakers, so that’s where AI came in.” Walsh recruited a team of production professionals — including foley artists, editors, sound designers, a composer and other roles commonplace in a film’s production — to help craft “Merry” in the vein of a traditional movie.

Human actors were hired to record the script and help guide how the characters should move and sound, but Walsh ultimately opted for AI-generated voices due to syncing issues with the technology. Instead, Walsh — with the help of the AI studio Phatty Acid, which worked on the film — used tools such as ElevenLabs’ voice generator and video generators Seedance and Nanobanana to bring them to life.

With roughly 50 different people working on the film throughout its 10-month production cycle, the film resembled a “hybrid AI production,” Walsh said, one he believes could be a new standard of making projects traditionally hampered by large budgets. “The quality of your AI production depends on the quality of your traditional production staff,” he says.

“If you have inexperienced people who don’t know production…and timing and how shots should look, it’s going to look like garbage.” But whether general

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