Bloomberg Tech

George Strompolos on why AI makes shots, but studios make films

George Strompolos· Co-Founder and CEO of Promise at Promise
·~5 min·English·Bloomberg
MultimodalAI CompanyBusiness Strategy
TL;DR

Promise CEO George Strompolos argues generative AI will not prompt a finished film into existence — it gives artist-led teams 10x leverage, reorders production so the proof-of-concept trailer comes first, and cuts some animation costs by 50% or more, unlocking stories that were once too expensive to make.

01Core Mental Model

10x Superpowers for Smaller Teams

An AI-native studio is a company built around creators who treat the best models as 10x leverage, so a smaller team can produce original films and series at a fraction of the usual cost and timeline.

the advent of generative AI has enabled creators to have 10 x superpowers, and we sought out to build a company around these new types of creators.

— George Strompolos, Bloomberg Tech
Key Insight
The 10x framing sells AI as amplification, not replacement. That is a recruiting and positioning move as much as a production one: it tells artists the technology makes them bigger, which is how a new studio attracts the talent incumbents still employ.
02Human vs Machine

Models Make Shots, Studios Make Films

Open a model and you get a shot; it still takes a studio — and character designers, VFX artists, and storytellers — to turn shots into a film, which keeps the process artist-led.

Models are good for shots. Studios are good for producing films and series, and it's a collaborative process.

— George Strompolos, Bloomberg Tech
Key Insight
The shot-versus-film line is really a claim about where today's models top out: dependable at the clip level, not yet at the feature level. So the human-run studio remains the unit that guarantees a whole story holds together.
03Method

Make the Last Thing First

Promise inverts the usual order and produces the trailer first, turning it into an early proof of concept so the team can see the story before committing to full production.

we make the last thing first. Here's what I mean by that. Typically, if you're making a film, one of the last things you do is produce the trailer.

— George Strompolos, Bloomberg Tech
Key Insight
Making the trailer first lets a team see how a film will look, feel, and sound before committing to full production. It is the prototype-before-you-build discipline from software, applied to the moment a studio decides what to pursue.
04Production Model

Animation and Hybrid: Two Cost Levers

Promise brings cost down through two production modes — animation, where generative media does much of the work, and hybrid, where real human performance sits inside synthetic environments — so smaller films can reach for blockbuster scope.

Hybrid is human performance in synthetic environments. And what that does is it serves to bring down the cost of visual effects and allowing smaller films to have great scope and scale.

— George Strompolos, Bloomberg Tech
Key Insight
Splitting the work this way puts AI where it is strongest, generating animated imagery, and keeps humans where they are hardest to replace, live performance. That lets the cost cut land without betting a film on fully synthetic actors.
05Economics

50% Cheaper Rewrites the Math

On certain animated productions Promise reports cost reductions of 50% or more, enough to move a feature from a hundreds-of-millions studio bet to something a startup can fund, make, and own.

This is actually about a reduction in cost and timeline. In the animated side, we're seeing cost reductions in the 50% plus for certain productions.

— George Strompolos, Bloomberg Tech
Key Insight
The number matters less as a margin than as a shift in who can finance and own a feature. Strompolos says Promise can now produce animated features itself, own them, and seek its own distribution — so he frames the saving as new stories, not cheaper versions of old ones.
06The Company

A Two-Year-Old Studio, Already in Production

A two-year-old startup backed by a16z, Google, and the Disney Accelerator, Promise has been deep in R&D on what a modern studio should be and is now in production on a hybrid horror series built at a fraction of a blockbuster's cost.

we're now entering into the production phase. So we're in production this week on a hybrid horror series

— George Strompolos, Bloomberg Tech
Key Insight
A two-year-old company already shooting, with a16z, Google, and Disney attached, signals the real race is not to invent new models but to be first to build a studio around the ones that exist, before the incumbents organize around them.