AI is shaking up Hollywood. Here are the startups and investors jumping into the fray.
But inside entertainment companies, it's a whole different story. The biggest studios and filmmakers are using AI technology in various ways — and people in Hollywood are taking note. The AI on the Lot conference in May has doubled its attendance to 1,200 over three years, while AI editing company Runway attracted some 1,000 people to its third film festival.
The tantalizing promise of AI is that it could solve big problems in the entertainment business, like content discovery and high production costs.
"No matter how you feel about AI tools in the media and entertainment business, they're here to stay," said Peter Csathy, who advises media companies.
Investors are climbing on board companies like Ecco, an AI startup that helps people find titles across multiple streamers using queries like "find me all the shows about F1." It has raised $7 million from Ben Silverman, Shaquille O'Neal, and others.
One such investor is Ishan Sinha, a consumer partner at Point72 Ventures. He said the hype around AI-generated video hasn't translated into consumer interest. He sees the most potential in companies that use AI to promote distribution through personalization, translation, and IP ownership.
"We believe the winning consumer businesses aggregate eyeballs — they have some type of a hook, whether it's content aggregation, playlists, proprietary IP, etc., that acquires and retains users," he said.
Point72 Ventures' investments include GlobalComix, which uses AI to bring recommendations and language translation to comic book and manga readers that they couldn't otherwise find, and Cheehoo, which is working with studios to simplify animation.
The firm also invested in Chronicle Studios, which aims to help animators grow their audiences and monetize their projects beyond YouTube.
Here are some AI companies transforming different areas of Hollywood, and the pitch decks some of them used to raise funding.
Faster, cheaper animation
AI may still be a long way from making full-length movies, but it's quickly making inroads in animation. Toonstar, a startup behind "StEvEn & Parker," uses AI for tasks ranging from developing storylines to creating images and says it can make episodes at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.
Chronicle Studios is a startup cofounded by Chris deFaria, a former animation president at Warner Bros. and Comcast's DreamWorks, that's using AI to help creators level up, with a focus on animators. Others chasing the animation or independent creator opportunity are Further Adventures, a new studio that's investing in digital creators and independent filmmakers; Invisible Universe, an animation studio backed by Seven Seven Six; and Promise, an AI studio backed by Peter Chernin's North Road, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google.
"AI can't really make stories that are enduring," deFaria told BI. "The biggest pain point is getting an audience."
AI is transforming special effects
Other companies, such as Runway, which has raised $545 million from General Atlantic and others, and Connect Ventures-backed Deep Voodoo, are using AI to provide tools for de-aging and other special effects work.
Some have entered the rollup stage. Metaphysic, which was known for de-aging Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for the Robert Zemeckis film "Here," was acquired in February by DNEG Group's AI company Brahma. Papercup's voice-cloning IP was acquired in June by RWS, a content solutions company, while its team was acquired by Scale AI.
AI is also being applied to speed the dubbing process, recreate the voices of bygone actors, and restore old films and TV series. With streamers going global, there's a big demand to translate titles for new markets, and new approaches to AI promise to eliminate awkward dubbing of the past.
Runway made news this past year for deals with Lionsgate to train an AI model on its library and with AMC Networks, which will use its tools to generate promotional material for its shows.
One player, Deepdub, which uses AI to dub movies and shows, just extended its tech to real-time dubbing of live sports commentary, esports shoutcasting, and breaking news coverage.
"For the first time, broadcasters can deliver real-time, multilingual dubbing that captures not just words, but the energy, urgency, and authenticity of live content," said Ofir Krakowski, the company's CEO.
Startups are tackling different phases of production
A third area where AI startups have been active in Hollywood is in the content creation process more broadly.
This can involve everything from AI in the script reading phase to scouring video libraries to generate new ideas for titles based on what's performed well in the past.
One, Paris-based Moments Lab, recently raised a $24 million round from backers including Oxx and Orange Ventures to expand its AI tools that are used by Warner Bros. Discovery, Hearst, and others.
Moments can make clips for social media seven times faster than the conventional approach, cofounder Phil Petitpont recently told BI, citing internal research. He said media companies would be able to use AI to help make full-length documentaries based on their video libraries in several months, while predictive modeling tools that can suggest audience-boosting changes are a year away.
"We're not very far from that because audience data is very easily available on YouTube," he said.
Read more:
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fast Company
19 minutes ago
- Fast Company
How AI can help restaurants provide better hospitality
At first glance, the idea of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the restaurant experience seems counterintuitive. After all, sitting down for a meal is one of the most fundamentally human experiences there is—from the warm greeting at the host stand, to the conversations at the table, and the feeling of eating food that someone else prepared for you with care. But when applied thoughtfully, AI doesn't detract from that—it enables more of it. And for restaurants, that's an operational game-changer. Despite macroeconomic conditions, people are still going out to eat—in fact, OpenTable data shows that dining is up 7% year over yearat the time of writing. But restaurants are feeling the squeeze navigating continued staffing shortages, shrinking margins, and the looming impact of tariffs. The National Restaurant Association's 2025 State of the Industry report revealed over a third (39%) of restaurants were not profitable in 2024. Meanwhile, 95% of operators said labor costs were a significant challenge last year, and 77% said recruiting and retaining employees remains a significant challenge. And that is where AI can help close the gaps. Take something as simple as answering the phone: 59% of customers hang up after being placed on hold for a minute or less and it's estimated that over 60% of calls to restaurants go unanswered during peak hours —that's money off a bottom line that's already running on a razor-thin margin of ~3-4%. AI phone agents like and PolyAI can help restaurants take reservations and answer pertinent dining questions, 24/7. This means less time spent manning the phone, and more revenue from increased bookings. Technology has even come so far that these voice agents can be trained on a restaurant's brand and tone-of-voice so that warmth and hospitality aren't lost to efficiency. Automating phone calls is a good example of how restaurants can start small with AI. With any business, a test-and-learn approach helps you figure out which tools are right for the job and helps get team members on board. Restaurant owners can start by implementing a single tool—say, one that only manages inventory or only optimizes staff scheduling. Or maybe you don't have resources for a full marketing team but could use large learning models like ChatGPT as a starting point to create marketing campaigns, social media content, and even help produce branded swag. You can see the themes that are appearing here: reducing operational friction and costs and streamlining processes. Because the less time restaurant managers spend in the office or hosts spend on the phone, the more time they can devote to the core part of the job: delivering great hospitality. Diners are the beneficiary of this upleveled dining experience—they will feel,but not see, AI behind the curtains. The use of AI will undoubtedly accelerate across the hospitality sector in the near and long-term future and it's promising and exciting to see a strong interest in adoption: 72% of restaurant operators plan to adopt AI soon, and nearly 94% acknowledge its necessity to remain competitive in the evolving landscape of food service. The future of hospitality isn't a trade-off between high-touch service and high-tech tools; it's a blend of both. It's my belief that by embracing these new tools to build stronger restaurants, we can, in turn, build a stronger industry.
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Cursor apologizes for unclear pricing changes that upset users
The CEO of Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI-powered coding environment Cursor, apologized Friday for a poorly communicated pricing change to its $20-per-month Pro plan. The changes resulted in some users complaining that they unexpectedly faced additional costs. 'We recognize that we didn't handle this pricing rollout well and we're sorry,' said Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. 'Our communication was not clear enough and came as a surprise to many of you.' Truell is referring to a June 16 update to Cursor's Pro plan. Instead of Pro users getting 500 fast responses on advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and then unlimited responses at a slower rate, the company announced subscribers would now get $20 worth of usage per month, billed at API rates. The new plan allows users to run coding tasks in Cursor with their AI model of choice until they hit the $20 limit, and then users have to purchase additional credits to continue using it. However, Pro users took to social media to file their complaints in the weeks following the announcement. Many users said they ran out of requests in Cursor rather quickly under the new plan, in some cases after just a few prompts when using Anthropic's new Claude models, which are particularly popular for coding. Other users claimed they were unexpectedly charged additional costs, not fully understanding they'd be charged extra if they ran over the $20 usage limit and had not set a spend limit. In the new plan, only Cursor's 'auto mode,' which routes to AI models based on capacity, offers unlimited usage for Pro users. Anysphere says it plans to refund users that were unexpectedly charged, and aims to be more clear about pricing changes moving forward. The company declined TechCrunch's request for comment beyond the blog post. Truell notes in the blog that Anysphere changed Cursor's pricing because 'new models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks' — meaning that some of the latest AI models have become more expensive, spending a lot of time and computational resources to complete complicated, multi-step tasks. Cursor was eating those costs under its old Pro plan, but now, it's passing them along to users. While many AI models have lowered in price, the cutting edge of performance continues to be expensive — in some cases, more pricey than ever. Anthropic's recently launched Claude Opus 4 model is $15 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire 'Lord of The Rings' series) and $75 per million output tokens. That's even more costly than Google's launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its most expensive AI model ever. In recent months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for 'priority' access to AI models — an additional premium on top of what AI models already cost that guarantees reliable, high speed performance. These expenses may be filtering their way down to AI coding tools, which seem to be getting more expensive across the industry. Users of another popular AI tool, Replit, were also caught off guard in recent weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive. Cursor has become one of the most successful AI products on the market, reaching more than $500 million in ARR largely through subscriptions to its Pro plan. However, Cursor now faces intense competition from the AI providers it relies on, while simultaneously figuring out how to affordably serve their more expensive AI models. Anthropic's recently launched AI coding tool Claude Code has been a hit with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company's ARR to $4 billion, and likely taking some users from Cursor in the process. Last week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic employees that led product development of Claude Code. But if Cursor intends to keep its market-leading position, it can't stop working with the state-of-the-art model providers — at least, not until its own home-grown models are more reasonably competitive. So Anysphere recently struck multi-year deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to offer a $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan with very high rate limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan also told TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time. However, it certainly feels as if the pressure between Cursor and AI model developers is building.
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Meta reportedly recruits Apple's head of AI models
Apple's head of AI models, Ruoming Pang, is leaving the company to work at Meta, Bloomberg reported on Monday. This marks the latest high-ranking AI executive Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has scooped up to lead his new AI superintelligence unit. Pang previously ran Apple's in-house team that trained the AI foundation models that underpin Apple Intelligence and other on-device AI features, according to the report. Apple's AI models haven't exactly been a huge success — they're far less capable than what OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Meta offer. Apple has reportedly even considered tapping third-party AI models to power its forthcoming AI-enabled Siri upgrade. Sources told Bloomberg that Pang's departure might be the first of many in Apple's troubled AI unit. Nevertheless, Pang could bring expertise in designing small, on-device AI models to Meta, joining an array of talent Zuckerberg has poached in recent months, including leaders from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Safe Superintelligence.
