Flow Studio Co-Founder Argues AI Will Kill the $200M Movie Budget

Nikola Todorovic, co-founder of AI filmmaking company Flow Studio, makes a pointed case that generative production tools will shatter Hollywood's grip on who gets to tell stories. Drawing on his upbringing in post-war Bosnia—where access to any film industry gatekeeper was essentially nonexistent—he frames AI not as a technical curiosity but as a structural challenge to an industry whose economics he calls "absolutely insane." He draws a direct historical parallel to indie producers who fled Thomas Edison's camera monopoly and founded Hollywood, arguing that AI is poised to do to production costs what streaming did to distribution.

Todorovic points to tools like Flow Studio's 3D Editor, Canvas, and MotionMaker—developed in partnership with Autodesk—as instruments of that reset, capable of collapsing budgets from hundreds of millions to near-zero. He is candid, however, that democratizing production won't automatically democratize success: discovery and marketing remain structural bottlenecks that cheaper cameras and AI renderers can't dissolve on their own.