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Note—001DevelopingFilm

Antonio Banderas to star in 'Cortés', an AI-powered epic from Utopai Studios

Antonio Banderas will star in 'Cortés', a 1519 epic Utopai Studios says AI tools will make affordable after 30 years unmade. Utopai has not said which shots will be generated or what the film costs.

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Nicholas Kazan has been trying to make 'Cortés' for more than 30 years. "It was always impossible: too big, too expensive, just always 'too,'" the Oscar-nominated writer of 'Reversal of Fortune' says on Utopai Studios' page for the film. Now Antonio Banderas is set to play Hernán Cortés, Paul Mignot ('Vaincre ou mourir') is directing, and filming is underway in Paris, with more shooting planned in Spain.

The money logic is the story. Utopai says it will use AI production tools to "help overcome the scale and cost limitations" that kept the film unmade, while keeping the filmmakers in control. Its site already shows test frames from Mignot's project: burning ships, a fleet in fog, Tenochtitlan's causeways. What nobody has said is which shots in the finished film will be generated, or what the whole thing costs.

Banderas also lands on one side of a split that is now visible among actors. Nicolas Cage says he refused to sign an AI waiver on Spider-Noir, while Banderas has signed on to a film sold on AI-enabled production.

In practice, this is the pitch independent producers will hear next: a real cast and a real script on set, with AI carrying the scale that a studio budget used to pay for. Whether that holds depends on shots Utopai has not shown yet, and the film is due in 2027.

Source: Utopai Studios, Variety and Screen Daily, Oct 12, 2026.

Provenance — Variety; Screen Daily; Utopai Studios announcement · Status: verified: HIGH (Variety + Screen Daily + Utopai)
Antonio Banderas signs on to 'Cortés', an epic built to use AI for scale
Note—002DevelopingFilm

Isabelle Huppert at Busan: AI hasn't replaced her yet

Isabelle Huppert told Busan it is still her acting and her face on screen, then joked she may soon 'speak' Korean and Japanese. The report names no dubbing service or film, so the voice question is talk, not a deal.

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Isabelle Huppert says AI hasn't come for her yet. "It really is me acting. So I haven't yet been threatened, confronted with that admittedly grim prospect," she told a press conference at the Busan International Film Festival on Monday, when asked whether AI is wiping out acting jobs. "So far I've seen that it's still my face on screen, and I hope that continues."

The same answer carried a joke that points somewhere else. She said she had heard she may soon be speaking Korean and Japanese, and added that the only Korean she knows is "annyeonghaseyo", hello. The report names no dubbing company and no film, so read it as talk about her voice rather than a signed deal.

The film she was promoting makes the point sharper. In Marc Fitoussi's comedy 'All About Corinne', Huppert plays a veteran extra who never gave up on acting, and background performers were at the center of the body scan fight in the 2023 actors' strike. She calls AI a threat in theory, then compares it to old fears that cinemas or records would die before vinyl came back, and admits she may be wrong to be optimistic.

In practice, a face is the part an audience checks, while a voice in another language travels with every foreign sale and is much harder to check. Treat a dubbed voice as its own use of a performance, and get the actor's written sign-off before any version is sold abroad.

Source: Variety, Busan International Film Festival press conference, Oct 12, 2026.

Provenance — Variety — Isabelle Huppert Says AI Hasn't Replaced Her Yet · Status: verified: MEDIUM (single trade source, quote story)
It is still Huppert's face on screen, but her voice may travel
Note—003DevelopingFilm

'Merry the Christmas Witch': director says it would have cost $80M

Director Tom Walsh says AI let him finish a two-hour Christmas feature for $1.5M against an $80M live-action estimate. Both figures are his own, with no breakdown, and the film has no distributor yet.

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Tom Walsh says his two-hour feature, Merry the Christmas Witch, cost $1.5 million to make with AI. He puts a conventional version at $80 million. Variety ran both numbers as an exclusive on Oct 12, and they traveled fast.

Both come from Walsh, and neither comes with a breakdown. The $80 million is a projection from TW3 Entertainment's own August press release, for a live-action film that was never shot. His last animated feature, Dwegons and Leprechauns, is listed at $20 million. Taken at face value, $1.5 million over two hours works out to about $12,500 per finished minute.

The more useful part is how he says the film got made: about 50 people over 10 months, with actors recording the script to set movement and timing, hand-drawn storyboards, editors, a composer and Foley artists. Variety names Seedance and Nano Banana as the tools, and the final voices came from ElevenLabs. "The quality of your AI production depends on the quality of your traditional production staff," Walsh told Variety.

In practice, the method travels better than the price tag. Boards and recorded performances give the generators a shot plan, and a published cost needs line items before a buyer will trust it. The film has no distributor yet, and nobody outside the studio has seen the cut.

Source: Variety and TW3 Entertainment, Oct 12, 2026.

Provenance — Variety (exclusive); ComingSoon; TW3 Entertainment project page · Status: single-source, reported
Director says his AI Christmas feature cost $1.5M, not $80M
Note—004DevelopingFilm

Prime Video takes global rights to 'Çukur: Vartolu', an AI-generated feature spun off from a Turkish hit with 6.4B YouTube views

Prime Video has taken global rights to Çukur: Vartolu, an AI-made spin-off of Turkish hit The Pit. Ay Yapım says actors performed every scene under AI-built characters, but the deal rests on one company statement and has no date or runtime.

Drafted by The Generated · Filed by The Generated

Prime Video has taken global rights to Çukur: Vartolu, an AI-made origin story for one of the most loved characters in The Pit (Çukur), the Turkish drama whose official YouTube channel has passed 6.4 billion views. It comes from AI Yapım, the Singapore-based AI studio Ay Yapım spun out in 2025, and it's the studio's second title on Prime after Castle Walls.

The line worth reading twice is in Ay Yapım's own statement: "The acting is human: actors performed the scenes, and AI generated the characters over their movement, timing and expression." Voice actors recorded all of the dialogue, the studio says. So this isn't a film typed into a prompt box; people still played every scene, and the AI built the face on screen and the streets around it.

The deal rests on that one statement, reported by Variety on Oct 10. Amazon hasn't commented, and there's no release date, runtime, director or cast. Fans also want to know whose face adult Vartolu wears, since many of them say the character simply is Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, who played him for four seasons.

In practice, the template travels even without a 131-episode franchise behind you: shoot your own actors, build the look over their performance, name your tools honestly, and credit every performer whose movement and voice carry the film.

Source: Ay Yapım statement via Variety, Oct 10, 2026; AI Yapım project pages; official Çukur YouTube channel stats, Oct 12.

Provenance — Variety — Prime Video takes global on 'Çukur: Vartolu' (exclusive); The Kadr — Prime Video acquires Çukur: Vartolu global rights · Status: verified: HIGH
A street market scene from the original Turkish series Çukur (The Pit), with Vartolu walking past stalls
Film

A real crew made the $1.5M AI Christmas feature. The $80M is its director's estimate

Merry the Christmas Witch was made by a hybrid crew of about 50, with actors, hand-drawn storyboards, a composer and Foley around the AI layer. Walsh puts the cost at $1.5M against an $80M live-action estimate, and both figures are his own with no line items. The film has no distributor yet.

Drafted by The Generated · Filed by The Generated
Merry, the film's title witch, in a red Santa-trimmed hat and coat, bursts out of a giant burning pumpkin riding a candy cane under a stormy sky

In a first-look clip TW3 Entertainment has posted for Merry the Christmas Witch, a squad of elves in goggles and red flight suits sprays a pack of black cats across a candlelit stone hall, using a bottle labeled "Santa's Repellant Spray, For Biting Cats." In the same clip, living brooms with carved faces hang behind iron bars. The footage is photoreal, and director Tom Walsh says the two-hour feature it comes from cost $1.5 million to make with AI, against the $80 million he estimated a conventional version would need.

Variety ran those two numbers as an exclusive on Monday, 12 October, and they traveled fast. Both come from Walsh, neither comes with a breakdown, and the bigger one is a projection for a film that was never shot. The more useful story for anyone making work is how he says the film got made: actors, storyboard artists, a composer and a Foley team doing the jobs they would do on any feature, with generative tools filling the frames in between.

Keep reading — 6 min

That’s all of Film.

13 Oct · 4 notes, filed as the record moved.

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