AI has come for docudramas, for summer blockbusters, even for adaptations of books about farts. What’s left other than holiday films?
Enter “Merry the Christmas Witch.” The film focuses on Merry, the first witch born on Christmas Day, who must defeat a coven of evil witches that has kidnapped Santa Claus in a bid to destroy Christmas. The project is based on a 2012 children’s book by Bobbi Hess, a 70-year-old New Orleans-based technical writer who, in her own words, called the adaptation “a perfect marriage” of subject and technology.
“AI enhanced the whole idea,” Hess tells Variety. “It was created by a human — the character Merry was created by me — but then Tom, with his amazing imagination and his wonderful ability to create wonderful creatures, it just came together.”
The “Tom” in question is Tom Walsh, the CEO of the independent production company TW3 Entertainment, who directed and co-wrote the adaptation. Walsh came across Hess’ book in 2014 during a Los Angeles meeting with her late husband, who gave Walsh a copy of her book. Walsh tells Variety he loved the idea of a Christmas witch and was eager to adapt the title.
But when he sat down to figure out the budget, the total cost seemed unwieldy: $80 million, a cost studios would balk at for “an unknown property,” Walsh said. Instead, using AI, he managed to produce the final two-hour film for $1.5 million, perhaps serving as a test case for the types of projects AI can help make.
“We were kind of stuck,” he says. “The doors are not very open to new kind[s] of ideas and new kind[s] of stories and everything, and that makes it a little tough for independent filmmakers, so that’s where AI came in.”
Walsh recruited a team of production professionals — including foley artists, editors, sound designers, a composer and other roles commonplace in a film’s production — to help craft “Merry” in the vein of a traditional movie. Human actors were hired to record the script and help guide how the characters should move and sound, but Walsh ultimately opted for AI-generated voices due to syncing issues with the technology. Instead, Walsh — with the help of the AI studio Phatty Acid, which worked on the film — used tools such as ElevenLabs’ voice generator and video generators Seedance and Nanobanana to bring them to life.
With roughly 50 different people working on the film throughout its 10-month production cycle, the film resembled a “hybrid AI production,” Walsh said, one he believes could be a new standard of making projects traditionally hampered by large budgets.
“The quality of your AI production depends on the quality of your traditional production staff,” he says. “If you have inexperienced people who don’t know production…and timing and how shots should look, it’s going to look like garbage.”
But whether general audiences will want to watch any AI film — much less a two-hour holiday film already competing for time with the dozens that came before it — is questionable. Even as AI films like “Gods Don’t Give Gifts” try to compete for attention at cinemas, outrage continues to swirl whenever a film or studio reveals the technology was used at any level. (The film currently has no distributor, though a spokesperson said “optimistic” conversations were underway with “a few different companies.”)
In Walsh’s view, there’s room for everything, and he’s hopeful people can look beyond the technology’s use. “They should really just be looking at the story and the characters,” he says. “They shouldn’t really be getting down to, well, ‘are these human or not human? It’s almost like when you’re watching animation, you’re not thinking you’re watching animated characters on that kind of basis.”
Even if audiences do reject it and distributors pass on picking up the film, Walsh remains undeterred. He is already working on another AI-generated picture, and he said he and Hess — who says she has “no issues at all with AI” — have remained in touch for future stories centered around the Christmas witch. “AI can again continue to help to create those adventures that children will love,” Hess says.
“It’s a little scary on taking those chances, but I think you have to take it in order to hit,” Walsh adds about finding distribution. “We would never have gotten a movie like ‘Merry’ made if we didn’t take that chance. It would have just sat in a screenplay never made, and so I have no regrets of taking that chance.”