The relationship between Hollywood and the AI sector is tense. Many filmmakers and industry professionals are wary of AI’s use in filmmaking, fearing it will replace human creativity. Disney and Universal sued AI company Midjourney for copyright infringement in June.
Despite this, several AI companies are trying to make inroads in Hollywood. On Tuesday, Moonvalley, a startup, made a significant move by releasing a fully-licensed, professional-grade video model to the public.
Moonvalley, founded by DeepMind engineers, has strong ties to the film industry. It owns AI film studio Asteria Film Co., founded this year by filmmaker and actress Natasha Lyonne and her boyfriend Bryn Mooser. Asteria has advised Moonvalley on developing its AI model, Marey, now available to filmmakers through subscriptions costing $14.99, $34.99, and $149.99 monthly.
Marey could become AI’s main point of entry into Hollywood. It’s developed with filmmaker approval and trained on licensed data, potentially helping studios avoid the ethical issues and copyright lawsuits plaguing the AI industry.
“We must ensure we’re building these tools correctly: with the filmmaker and artist at the center, not automating their job away,” Moonvalley’s CEO and co-founder, Naeem Talukdar, told TIME.
Moonvalley has secured funding from investors like Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. Asteria is using Marey for a new documentary about Carl Sagan, restoring and tweaking footage. Talukdar also states that Marey is in pilot programs at over a dozen “large studios,” as well as with major advertising firms.
Many AI video models are black boxes: you enter a prompt, and they generate an entire scene. Tweaking one variable can alter others, making it difficult to control everything filmed.
Moonvalley aims to create tools that integrate into filmmaking, like CGI and special effects programs in the past. Marey lets filmmakers input storyboards or frames and tweak them, theoretically giving them more control over details like objects, characters, motion, and scene composition.
“It’s an iterative process where you start with input guidance and build towards the desired scene, similar to VFX workflows today,” Talukdar says. “Even small independent studios without massive infrastructure can create and curate scenes granularly.”
Talukdar demonstrated Marey, showing video of an actress in a studio turning her head and drawing a gun from under her scarf. He then used the model to create a scene of an AI-generated woman on a train, moving like the actress. He shifted the camera view and added mountains outside the train window. Each generated scene costs creators about $1 to $2 to render, comparable to other AI video generators and cheaper than reshooting footage.
The model is trained on footage licensed from IP owners. About 80% comes from independent filmmakers and agencies with B-roll footage. This means Marey is trained on about one-fifth the data of competitors like Google’s Veo 3, according to Talukdar. However, he claims Moonvalley compensates with superior technology created by alumni from Deepmind, Meta, and other leading labs.
“If we scraped data, our model would undoubtedly be more powerful,” he says. “But we believe you don’t need to be the best; you just need to be among the best. This is the first generative, fully-licensed model where you don’t have to sacrifice quality.”
Many Hollywood filmmakers view AI as contrary to their creative process. This tension was a major factor during the Hollywood strikes, with concerns about job losses through automation. Talukdar argues AI tools will create new jobs and allow studios to stretch budgets, not cut them.
“There’s the idea that you can make a movie for $5 million instead of $50 million, which is partly true,” he says. “But studios are thinking that for the same $50 million and 100 people, they can do what would have cost $100 million before. It’ll be the same number of people, doing more and better content.”
Marey’s supporters in the film industry include Ángel Manuel Soto, director of “Blue Beetle” and other films. “I feel like Moonvalley and Asteria heard artists’ concerns about ethical AI, and what they created with Marey is a breakthrough,” he wrote in an email to TIME. “From streamlining studio workflows to empowering emerging creators in places like Puerto Rico and Dakar, Marey is the first generative AI that actually gets what we need: a way to move fast, responsibly do more with less, and still protect the people who make this industry human.”
But many filmmakers are skeptical, fearing a bait-and-switch. “Looking at the larger applications, companies and studios never want to empower artists to make cooler stuff for the same money,” Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator and showrunner of BoJack Horseman, said. “They want to make things cheaper, cut artists out, pay people less, and use these technologies in a way that doesn’t improve the work.”
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