Independent Director Spends $1.5M on AI-Generated Christmas Film, Claims It Saved Tens of Millions

Tom Walsh, CEO of TW3 Entertainment, has completed "Merry the Christmas Witch," a feature film based on a children's book by Bobbi Hess, produced almost entirely with AI tools including the video generators Seedance and Nanobanana and ElevenLabs' voice synthesizer. Walsh says the project cost $1.5 million and took roughly 50 people ten months to complete — a fraction of the $80 million he estimated a traditional production would have required, though the film currently has no distributor.

The project illustrates the ongoing tension around AI-generated filmmaking: Walsh argues AI was the only path to getting an independent, unknown property made at all, while critics and observers have pointed to the uncanny visual quality of the footage. Human actors were hired to record performances and guide character movement, but their voices were ultimately replaced by AI-generated audio. The film lands as a real-world stress test of whether cost-efficiency alone can justify wholesale AI production — and whether audiences will follow.