'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.
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.
