The AI Hollywood race is intensifying as Luma AI, which is behind one of the more novel of a new wave of video generators, says it’s planting a flag in Los Angeles.
The Northern California company is starting “Dream Lab LA,” a studio space where it hopes to explain its mission to the entertainment business while recruiting and training filmmakers to use its tools. The news is the latest move from what is becoming an onslaught of AI video models (basically, products that let a person create or change a video without staging a physical shoot) into the filmmaking space.
“We need even higher levels of intelligence in creative work, and that’s what Luma is committed to building,” Amit Jait, the company’s CEO, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
As part of the announcement Luma has hired Verena Puhm, a producer and writer with BBC and CNN credits, to head up the lab, as well as the L.A.-based filmmaker Jon Finger to work as creative workflow executive.
The lab will be a kind of combined meeting, coworking and educational venue where creatives can come together to produce content using the Luma tool.
“It’s access, honestly,” Puhm said in an interview. “We want to provide a creative R&D space … to educate the filmmakers and educate the studio partners.” She and Jait said the process will be two-directional, allowing the company to garner intel on the best way to build future tools for Hollywood as well.
The lab, whose location executives said will be announced shortly, aims to open this summer.
Luma’s moves are part of the larger aim of making Hollywood a more automated and digital place, where films created by humans are augmented — or supplanted, according to skeptics — by machine-created video.
Like many AI video firms, Luma has informal arrangements with a number of the big Hollywood studios to use its tools. (Much of it is still in production but expect a lot more AI to creep up in your favorite movies and TV shows in the coming year.)
But the company’s model also mixes in a consumer component; it has a monthly $30 subscription service for individuals who want to create their own AI video. Luma is similar in this regard to Moonvalley, another startup that announced its own consumer-facing model this week.
Luma burst onto the scene in early 2024 with Dream Machine, a short-form video-generation tool that one-upped OpenAI’s Sora in slickness and flexibility. The company has since raised $100 million, including from Amazon, to go along with the $73 million it had previously raised.
Jait’s firm has put an emphasis on “multimodal” tools — essentially allowing audio and video prompts instead of just text with the aim of giving users more control. One of the latest such tools is Modify, which can transform an ordinary shoot into something more extravagant.
On a video call Finger demonstrated a few use cases, including a woman sitting in a modern Los Angeles garage that became a woman riding a horse in an old Western town, or two men sitting at a backyard table who were suddenly in a Medieval alehouse. Period movies, among others, just got a whole lot cheaper. “Right now we bang our heads against the Hollywood wall,” Finger said. “Now I can finally get the shot I need to get.”
While few doubt Hollywood will use these tools, which ones will dominate remains an open question. Luma competes with other startups like Runway AI, which has formal deals with a number of Hollywood entities, and established players like Google’s Veo line, which has been trained on many years of Google and YouTube videos and has been an impressive run lately. And of course the legality of the whole enterprise is in question given Disney’s lawsuit against Midjourney and other copyright challenges to the trained models.
Jait says he sees the tools supercharging the quantity of productions and thus, as a result, increasing the possibility of groundbreaking work.
“Right now you’re changing your ad creative every six months when it should be done every six seconds,” he said. “Why are you making 5 movies a year when you should be making 50, you should be making 100?”
“This changes the economics,” he added, “so drastically.”
