An independent studio has made a feature-length Christmas movie mostly with AI, and the director says it saved him tens of millions of dollars. As Futurism AI reports, “Merry the Christmas Witch” cost $1.5 million to make. That’s a fraction of the $80 million director Tom Walsh says a traditional version would have cost. The early footage, though, has drawn harsh reviews for its “ghoulish and uncanny” visuals, and the film doesn’t have a distributor yet.
🎬 Quick Summary
- What: “Merry the Christmas Witch,” a children’s holiday film based on a book by author Bobbi Hess
- Who: Tom Walsh, CEO of independent studio TW3 Entertainment, who directed and co-wrote it
- Cost: $1.5 million, against an estimated $80 million for a traditional production
- Team: About 50 people working for 10 months
- Tools: ElevenLabs for voices, plus the video and image generators Seedance and Nanobanana
- Status: No distributor
🧩 How They Made It
Walsh calls it a “hybrid AI production.” In practice, it sounds mostly like AI. He hired human actors to record the script and to guide how the characters moved and sounded. Then he replaced their performances with AI-generated voices from ElevenLabs. The visuals came from AI generators.
So the humans were basically scaffolding. They set the timing, the emotion and the blocking, and then the AI covered over their work. That’s a pattern worth watching, because it’s becoming the go-to workflow for small studios trying to stretch a budget.
Walsh still argues that the human crew mattered most. “The quality of your AI production depends on the quality of your traditional production staff,” he told Variety. “If you have inexperienced people who don’t know production…and timing and how shots should look, it’s going to look like garbage.”
💡 Why Walsh Went This Route
His reasoning is easy to follow. An “unknown property” with an $80 million price tag isn’t something risk-averse studios want to fund. “We were kind of stuck,” Walsh said. “The doors are not very open to new kind[s] of ideas and new kind[s] of stories.”
He’s right about the industry. Hollywood is fixated on IP, and original projects have a hard time getting money. “We would never have gotten a movie like ‘Merry’ made if we didn’t take that chance,” he said.
Futurism AI points to a counterexample, though. This year’s breakout horror hit “Obsession” reportedly made half a billion dollars on a budget of less than $1 million, with an original story and no generative AI doing the heavy lifting. Cheap filmmaking isn’t new. What’s new is the assumption that cheap has to mean AI.
📊 What This Tells Us About AI Video
What stands out here is the gap between saving money and making something good. Some takeaways:
- The tools can make a feature film. A 50-person team finished a full movie in 10 months. A few years ago that wasn’t possible.
- They can’t make it look right yet. Holding characters steady across scenes, getting expressions right and avoiding uncanny motion are still big weaknesses, especially over a full feature.
- “$1.5M vs. $80M” is a pitch, not a fair comparison. The $80 million figure assumes a big-studio animated film. A smaller traditional animation project would have cost far less than that.
- Distribution is the real test. Making a movie is getting cheaper. Getting anyone to show it, and audiences to watch it, isn’t.
🔮 What to Watch
Expect more indie studios to try this playbook, especially for kids’ content and holiday titles where buyers expect less polish. Also expect more pushback from audiences. People have little patience for anything that looks like AI slop, and children’s content gets extra scrutiny.
For people working in AI, the lesson is that how much a tool can do and whether people will accept the result are two separate questions. Generating a whole movie is now a solved problem. Generating one people actually want to watch isn’t.
Whether “Merry the Christmas Witch” lands a distributor before the holidays will be an early sign of where the market stands. You can find the full story and footage details at Futurism AI.