Prime Video buys an AI spin-off of The Pit, with human actors under every face

A boy loses his mother and his grandfather, grows up on the streets of Doğubeyazıt in eastern Türkiye, and waits for a father who never comes looking for him. Years later, in Istanbul, the waiting has turned into revenge and Salih has become Vartolu. That's the synopsis Ay Yapım has released for Çukur: Vartolu, an origin story for one of the most loved characters in Turkish television, and the studio says every frame of it was made with AI.

Prime Video has taken global rights to the film, Variety reported in an exclusive on Saturday 10 October. It comes from AI Yapım, the Singapore-incorporated AI studio spun out in 2025 by Ay Yapım, the producer behind Endless Love, Ezel and Çukur itself. It's AI Yapım's second title on Prime Video after Castle Walls, a two-episode historical drama that arrived on the service in August. What's different this time is the IP: Çukur ran for four seasons and 131 episodes on Show TV between 2017 and 2021, and its official YouTube channel has passed 6.4 billion views.

What Ay Yapım says it made

The most useful line in the announcement is the one that complicates the headline. The Ay Yapım statement said every frame was "generated with AI, from the characters' faces to every setting," and then added this: "The acting is human: actors performed the scenes, and AI generated the characters over their movement, timing and expression. All dialogue was recorded by human voice actors."

So this isn't a prompt-to-film feature with nobody in the room. It's closer to performance capture, where a performer's body, timing and expression drive a character, except here the face and the world around it are rendered by a model rather than animated by hand. Actors still had to play the scenes and voice actors still had to carry every line. What AI replaced, by the studio's own account, is everything the audience sees on screen: the settings and the faces.

The studio frames the film as a new chapter rather than a remake. "Rather than revisiting the series, the film opens a new chapter in its world, built around Vartolu's origins and drawing on Ay Yapim's catalogue," the statement said. The tagline does the rest of the selling: "No one is more dangerous than a man with nothing left to lose."

The deal rests on one statement

The deal itself needs careful handling. Every report we found, in English and in Turkish, traces back to that single Variety exclusive, and every deal fact in it comes from what the company said in a statement. We found nothing from Amazon or Prime Video. There's no release date, runtime, director, cast list, territory list or trailer, and the only image in circulation is one still credited "Courtesy AI Yapim".

That's why we're calling it a film rather than a feature. Variety and Ay Yapım say "movie" and "film" without giving a length, and AI Yapım's only finished work so far is Castle Walls, which Prime Video lists as two episodes, the first running 17 minutes. "Global rights" also doesn't yet tell us whether the film will stream on Prime in Türkiye, a question several Turkish outlets have left open.

The 6.4 billion figure holds up, but it needs reading properly. The YouTube Data API shows 6,490,809,615 lifetime views on the official Çukur channel, which has posted 4,954 videos since September 2017. That's a franchise audience built on full episodes and clips over eight years, not a measure of demand for this film.

Inside the pipeline, as far as we can see it

Ay Yapım hasn't said which tools made Vartolu. It has said a lot about Castle Walls, which is the best guide to the studio's method. AI Yapım's project page lists ChatGPT for prompt enhancement, Midjourney for visual exploration, Runway and Google's Nano Banana for character integration, Veo, Kling, ComfyUI and Topaz for video generation and finishing, Runway and ElevenLabs for voice and dubbing, an in-house storyboard tool, and AYDNA 1.0, which it describes as a proprietary video diffusion model fine-tuned on Ay Yapım's licensed catalog.

The studio's own technical report, published in October 2025, is more specific. AYDNA is a set of LoRA adapters (small add-on weights that teach an existing model a look without retraining the whole thing) built on Alibaba's open-weight Wan2.1 image-to-video model, trained on roughly 40 clips of two to five seconds from Ay Yapım's series El Turco. The adapters touch less than 1% of the model's parameters. When coverage of Castle Walls described a model "trained exclusively" on Ay Yapım's catalog, it overstated things: the style layer is Ay Yapım's, but the base model was trained by Alibaba on data Ay Yapım doesn't control, and the paper itself says the El Turco clips were used "strictly for non-commercial research and evaluation purposes under fair-use principles".

None of that is confirmed for Vartolu. On voices, reports on Castle Walls disagreed about how much of the dubbing was synthetic, while the Vartolu statement is unambiguous that human voice actors recorded all of the dialogue. For a franchise whose fans know every cadence of the original cast, that's the sensible call.

The fans want Erkan

On Turkish X the news traveled through entertainment aggregators rather than the studio, which hasn't posted about the film there. @DiziciBagyan and @dizianaIiz each drew about 25,000 views and @PopFestTR about 264,000. The replies split, and the loudest objection wasn't about AI in the abstract. It was about Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, who played Vartolu Sadettin for four seasons and, for many fans, simply is the character. One asked how a model would ever manage Vartolu's accent, others called the project a cheapening of the art, and a smaller camp said they just want the backstory.

That points to the question the statement leaves open: whose face is adult Vartolu wearing? Ay Yapım says AI generated the characters over the actors' performances, but it hasn't named a single cast member, and it hasn't said whether the character resembles Köstendil or whether he was asked. He has defended his image before; in 2020 an Istanbul intellectual property court awarded him damages against a bank that used his likeness without permission. We're not suggesting a dispute here, only that it's the first thing we'd ask the studio.

What this means for AI creators

In practice, for anyone making work this week, this deal is a map of what a buyer is actually paying for. Prime Video didn't pick up a model or a demo reel. It picked up a character with eight years of audience behind him, a producer with a long record of selling Turkish drama abroad, and a pipeline that keeps actors and voice actors at the center of the performance, with AI as the production method rather than the pitch.

Most independent AI filmmakers don't have a 131-episode franchise to spin off, but the rest of that template travels. Our read, not anything Amazon has said, is that buyers are more comfortable when there's a human performance under the pixels, which makes a performance-led workflow (shooting your own actors, then building faces and worlds over them) a stronger pitch than pure text-to-video. Be precise about your tools and your training data, because the gap between a "proprietary model" and a LoRA on an open-weight base is exactly what a distributor's lawyers will ask about. And credit the performers whose movement and voices carry the work, since the audience most likely to reject an AI film is the one that loved the actor it replaces.

The things still to find out are the ones that will decide how this lands: a release date, a runtime, the names of the actors under those faces, and whether Prime Video says anything at all. Amazon has stayed quiet so far, in the same weekend Nicolas Cage told a New York Comic Con panel he had refused to sign an AI waiver on Spider-Noir, the Sony series made for Prime Video. Nobody has linked the two stories, but they make an odd pair of headlines for one streamer's Saturday.

Timeline

• Date: Mon 23 Oct 2017. What happened: Çukur premieres on Show TV, produced by Ay Yapım; Source: Ay Yapım, Wikipedia
• Date: Mon 7 Jun 2021. What happened: Çukur ends after four seasons and 131 episodes; Source: Wikipedia
• Date: Oct 2025. What happened: AI Yapım's AYDNA report: LoRA adapters on Wan2.1, about 40 El Turco clips; Source: Technical report, Zenodo
• Date: Fri 10 Oct 2025. What happened: Ay Yapım announces AI Yapım and Castle Walls; Source: Anadolu Agency
• Date: Tue 11 Aug 2026. What happened: Castle Walls lands on Prime Video, two episodes; Source: Prime Video listing, GamesBeat
• Date: Sat 10 Oct 2026. What happened: Variety exclusive: Prime Video takes global rights to Çukur: Vartolu; Source: Variety
• Date: TBC. What happened: Çukur: Vartolu release date and runtime; Source: Not announced

Sources and what is unconfirmed: Variety exclusive by Nick Vivarelli (Sat 10 Oct), read in full, quoting an Ay Yapım statement; aiyapim.com and its Castle Walls project page; the AYDNA technical report (October 2025); the Prime Video Castle Walls listing; GamesBeat (12 Aug); Anadolu Agency (10 Oct 2025); YouTube Data API and X post metrics, read 12 Oct. Amazon has made no statement we could find. Release date, runtime, director, cast, territories, tools used on Vartolu and Köstendil's involvement or consent are all unconfirmed, and we did not contact Ay Yapım or Amazon for this draft.

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