After years of AI hype, doomsday predictions, and more thinkpieces than anyone asked for…Hollywood is officially moving forward with its first real AI-powered movie.
Yup, you read that right.
Meet Critterz — the first major AI-assisted film, backed by OpenAI and racing toward a Cannes 2026 premiere.
The backstory’s wild: three years ago, Chad Nelson (now at OpenAI) messed around with DALL-E to whip up some weird little forest critters for a short parody. Fast-forward and that tiny side project has morphed into a full-scale production with heavyweight backing from Vertigo Films (London), Native Foreign (L.A.), and Federation Studios.
The crazy part? Instead of the usual 3 years and $100M budget for an animated movie, this team’s aiming to knock it out in just 9 months — for under $30M. The secret weapon? A mash-up of human artists and AI tools (yep, GPT-5 included).
The setup looks like this:
Writers fresh off Paddington in Peru are on script duty.
Professional voice actors are already locked in.
Human artists sketch, AI fills in the details.
And OpenAI? They finally get to prove their tools can do more than just spit out storyboards.
Why it matters:
If Critterz sticks the landing, it won’t just be a quirky AI experiment — it’ll be proof that AI can actually carry a whole movie production.
And don’t forget the backdrop: Hollywood’s deeply split on AI. Lawsuits are flying, last year’s strikes were all about stopping actors from being cloned, and while Netflix scrambles to write new rules, Disney and Universal are busy suing Midjourney. It’s a mess.
So… genius move or total chaos? Honestly, a little of both.
AI tools are way better than they were a couple years ago — visuals are cleaner, animation tricks are smarter, and social feeds are already full of AI-made clips that look shockingly real. But the real question isn’t can the tech make images. It’s this: will people actually show up for an AI-assisted movie? Will they feel the heart — or just the polish?
Bottom line: Critterz is Hollywood’s guinea pig.
If it works: expect studios to salivate over faster, cheaper pipelines.
If it fails: it becomes a very public, very pricey ($30M) reminder that maybe robots don’t belong in the production room.
Either way, this is the opening bell for the “AI vs. Hollywood” showdown.
