--- title: 'An AI Studio Opened Next Door to Culver City. Its Sound Stage Was a Corner of the Office' type: 'blog post' section: 'Industry' standfirst: 'Promise is making an AI-assisted horror film within sight of the lots where Singin'' in the Rain was shot, on a budget in the low millions. The unsettling part of the reporting is not what the software can draw. It is the list of things the software makes unnecessary.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-20' updated: '2026-08-20' about_films: - 'Singin'' in the Rain (1952)' - 'Men in Black (1997)' tags: - 'AI film studios Hollywood' - 'Promise AI studio Touch Grass' - 'Google DeepMind A24 deal' - 'synthetic performers AI' - 'AI visual effects disclosure' - 'AI post-production Hollywood' sources: - 'https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/16/directors-embracing-ai-film-making' - 'https://www.eweek.com/news/ai-film-studios-hollywood-production-model/' - 'https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-google-a24-ai-filmmaking-deepmind-investment/' - 'https://deadline.com/2026/06/is-ai-hollywood-new-cosmetic-surgery-1236958187/' - 'https://www.themovieblog.com/2026/08/hollywood-vfx-in-2026-how-ai-is-rewriting-post-production-workflows/' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/an-ai-studio-opened-next-door-to-culver-city-its-sound-stage-was-a-corner-of-the-office' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # An AI Studio Opened Next Door to Culver City. Its Sound Stage Was a Corner of the Office *Promise is making an AI-assisted horror film within sight of the lots where Singin' in the Rain was shot, on a budget in the low millions. The unsettling part of the reporting is not what the software can draw. It is the list of things the software makes unnecessary.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-20 · Industry ## A corner of the office Robert Booth's report for the Guardian has a detail in it that will stay with me longer than any of the numbers. He visited Promise, an AI studio that set up this summer near the colonnaded entrance to Sony Pictures' Culver City lot — close enough that the artists working there can see the ground where *Singin' in the Rain* and *Men in Black* were shot. Promise is shooting its own newly announced horror film, *Touch Grass*, for a budget in the low millions of dollars. The sound stage, Booth writes, was little more than a corner of the office. That is the whole argument in one sentence, and it is not an argument about image quality. A hundred years of film industrial history is stacked up on the other side of that wall — the stages, the shops, the standing sets, the crews who know where everything is — and the company next door has concluded it does not need to get past the wall to make a movie. ![A professional film camera rigged on a set, photographed at Cannes in May 2026.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/88320ba0-1e69-4333-9f2e-7a15f6fd7587.webp) *Photo: Elyot Boudart · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camera_on_the_set_of_The_White_Lotus_Season_4_at_the_Cannes_Film_Festival.jpg)* ## What gets made unnecessary Promise is backed by Google, by Silicon Valley venture capital, and by Disney. Its models generate backgrounds, special effects, and what the reporting calls synthetic performers; some are American, and some are market-leading Chinese systems. The result, in Booth's phrasing, is that the vast sound stages and the financing of traditional studios are becoming less necessary. Less necessary is the phrase to sit with. Studio infrastructure has never only been infrastructure. The reason a first feature was hard to make was partly technical and mostly institutional: somebody with a stage and a bank had to agree that you should be allowed. Every filmmaker who has described their twenties has described that gate. So when the filmmakers Booth spoke to say the technology could let them bypass the studio giants and take more creative risks, I understand the appeal exactly, and I notice which risk is being described. The risk of asking permission is the one being removed. The risk of a bad film is untouched. Google is on both sides of this. In June it put about seventy-five million dollars into A24 through a partnership with DeepMind, to build filmmaking tools — the specialist independent distributor of the last decade, capitalised by the company whose models the tools will run on. TechRepublic covered the deal and illustrated its own article with an image generated by Google's Nano Banana, which is either very funny or the tidiest possible summary of where this is going. ![A camera set up for indoor filming, with its rig and lighting around it.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/ea93acc7-b0ee-45fc-8393-62f57b18f8e6.webp) *Photo: Nirvana Studios - Custom Circus · [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camera_set-up_for_the_indoor_filming.jpg)* ## The part nobody announces While the new studios talk, the old ones are quiet. Deadline's Jake Kanter reported in June that studios are already using the technology to tweak films they have made and are keeping hush about how. His framing was cosmetic surgery, and the sting in it is not the procedure. It is the silence: keeping it quiet, he wrote, has consequences for everyone. He is right, and the consequence is specific. A viewer can form a view about a synthetic performer they were told about. A viewer cannot form any view at all about a face that was smoothed, a crowd that was thickened or a line that was regenerated in post without a word said. Undisclosed use hides the technique and then removes the audience's standing to have an opinion about it, which is a strange thing to take from the people paying for the ticket. The trade coverage has settled into two stories that do not talk to each other. eWeek and others write about AI studios challenging the traditional production model, which is a story about competition. The post-production reporting is about AI rewriting how the work inside existing films gets done, which is a story about disclosure. The first will be argued in public for years. The second is being decided now, invisibly, in films that are already in cinemas. ![The director Franc Roddam standing beside an Arriflex film camera on set.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/abafda5b-0c39-4dab-8943-3f9263702faf.webp) *Photo: Pat Latimer · [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Director_Franc_Roddam_with_an_Arriflex_film_camera_on_the_set_of_%22.jpg)* ## The word doing the most work Synthetic performers. Every other term in this story describes a tool. Backgrounds, effects, workflows, pipelines — a background has never had an opinion about its own use, and nobody has to be consulted about a matte painting. That one phrase describes a person's replacement in the grammar of a job listing, and it goes by in the reporting at the same speed as the rest. On the set in Culver City, an actor named Tori Thomas was working on *Touch Grass*. The Guardian's photograph is of a real performer, in a real corner of a real office, making a film that will be finished by systems trained on other performers' work. Both halves of the argument were standing in the same room, and only one of them was on the call sheet. ## In this piece - 1952 · [Singin' in the Rain](https://cinepixo.com/movies/singin-in-the-rain-1952) - 1997 · [Men in Black](https://cinepixo.com/movies/men-in-black-1997) ## Sources - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/16/directors-embracing-ai-film-making - https://www.eweek.com/news/ai-film-studios-hollywood-production-model/ - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-google-a24-ai-filmmaking-deepmind-investment/ - https://deadline.com/2026/06/is-ai-hollywood-new-cosmetic-surgery-1236958187/ - https://www.themovieblog.com/2026/08/hollywood-vfx-in-2026-how-ai-is-rewriting-post-production-workflows/ Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/an-ai-studio-opened-next-door-to-culver-city-its-sound-stage-was-a-corner-of-the-office Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.