Background
Wonder Studios is a London-based AI-native film and content studio. Through its agency arm, it works with brands and artists on commercials, music videos and branded content. Alongside this sits an original IP business, including the anthology Beyond the Loop and upcoming long-form projects, along with a growing co-production slate.
Founded in 2025 by filmmaker Justin Hackney and entrepreneur Xavier Collins, Wonder has raised over $15 million, with investors including Atomico, LocalGlobe, Blackbird and Adobe Ventures, with angel investment from individuals across ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and the wider entertainment and technology industry. The company is also supported by senior advisors spanning film, marketing and studio-building, including Danny Perkins (founder and CEO, Elysian Film Group) and Jackie Lee-Joe (former CMO of Netflix and BBC Studios), who work closely with Wonder’s leadership across creative, commercial and audience strategy.
A still from Something in the Heavens, courtesy of Wonder Studios.
Application of AI
Music video production: Something in the Heavens
Wonder produced a music video for Lewis Capaldi’s Something in the Heavens, working with Google DeepMind, YouTube and Universal Music Group, built using Google’s Flow filmmaking tool. Nine creative technologists worked across time zones in a 24-hour production cycle under Hackney’s direction, generating material that was then edited down, with typically one or two sequences kept from every hundred generated. Hackney describes the experience:
“Flow allowed us to explore those ideas without constraint. There was no sense of limitation, just a fluid back and forth between instinct and image.”
The finished material was transferred to 8mm and 16mm film stock and back to digital, giving the footage a distinct analogue grain, then finished with conventional editing and colour grading.
Short film anthology : Beyond the Loop
Beyond the Loop is an anthology series, bringing together a new generation of filmmakers using AI-assisted production workflows to develop original films. The first season established a format, and the second was produced with support from CapCut, InVideo, ElevenLabs and OpenArt. Across both seasons the anthology has amassed over 6.5 million views on YouTube, and coverage in Deadline, Forbes and NBC. The aim of the programme is to back a new generation of filmmakers outside traditional studio routes, and provide the infrastructure to build their own IP in public.
IP ownership: giving filmmakers a stake
Alongside its production work, Wonder has developed a legal and commercial framework, DREAM, designed to clarify IP ownership for filmmakers on AI-native projects. Modelled on the SAFE instrument used in early-stage startup funding, it treats a short film as a prototype: if the project develops into a series or feature, the filmmaker shares in the upside as a partner. First tested on Beyond the Loop, Collins describes it “as a Y Combinator-style model”.
Applying the CoSTAR Foresight Lab AI roadmap
Our AI roadmap is organised around three strategic outcomes – frameworks, targeted support, and growth – and driven by nine recommendations that seek to align technological advancement with ethical responsibility and economic opportunity, ensuring long-term growth and success of the UK screen sector.
How this case study aligns with the roadmap
- Independent creation
- Wonder’s model aims to support small, distributed teams to produce broadcast-quality work without traditional resource bases, and give independent filmmakers (through structured programmes like Beyond the Loop) a replicable route to production support, capital and commercial infrastructure, enabled by new tools and technologies.
- Responsible AI
- The production of Something in the Heavens, with extensive generation followed by human curation and analogue post-processing, reflects a considered position on the role of generative tools. Editorial decisions remained with the creative team throughout.
- Sector adaptation
- Wonder’s IP framework addresses a mismatch between the economics of AI-assisted production and contractual norms (such as net points arrangements) inherited from traditional film. Already tested on projects including Beyond the Loop and now applied as an open instrument, it offers a model for how organisations might structure agreements with AI-native creators.
Resources
Citation
@online{johnston2026,
author = {Johnston, David},
publisher = {CoSTAR Foresight Lab},
title = {Wonder {Studios:} {Hybrid} Content Creation and Community
Building},
date = {2026-07-28},
langid = {en}
}