Luma launches AI-powered production studio with faith-focused Wonder Project
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AI video generation startup Luma has launched Innovative Dreams, a production company built in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and TV on Amazon Prime. The tie-up’s first show will be called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley and set to launch this spring on Prime Video. “Innovative Dreams is a production services company where seasoned filmmakers from Director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists work with great studios and filmmakers to help them realize ambitious ideas,” Luma said Thursday in a social media post. The company envisages creative teams collaborating in real time with Luma Agents to make changes to sets, props, and lighting, as well as bring in footage of human actors. Luma Agents are the company’s recently launched tools designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. “This is a significant improvement over the current virtual production and performance capture processes where things come together only in post,” Luma’s post said. “This is the leverage of AI — not just faster or cheaper, but better than what came before.” Luma isn’t the only startup to move from tooling to production. AI startup Higgsfield last week launched an original series, starting with a 10-minute sci-fi episode, and London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is working on a documentary with Campfire Studios. The launch comes the same week that competitor Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said film studios should take the $100 million they spend on a single film and instead use AI to produce 50 films in order to increase their chances of making a blockbuster. Techcrunch event Meet your next investor or portfolio startup at Disrupt Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $410. Meet your next investor or portfolio startup at Disrupt Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $410. San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 REGISTER NOW Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has made a similar case, telling TechCrunch that Hollywood’s soaring production costs have made filmmaking increasingly constrained. Generative AI, he argues, could make filmmaking faster, cheaper, and more efficient without sacrificing quality. That thinking underpins Luma’s new partnership with Wonder Project. Wonder Project, launched in 2023, is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten with the goal of serving the faith and values audience globally. Their first project, House of David, a Biblical drama series about the life of King David, was released on Amazon Prime in 2025. It’s unclear whether Innovative Dreams will focus solely on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond Wonder’s remit. TechCrunch has reached out for clarification. In a video promoting the partnership, Erwin said Innovative Dreams will use a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (as in “Avatar”) and virtual production (as in “The Mandalorian”), done live and more cheaply using Luma’s tools. Performance capture is a technique where actors perform in a green-screen environment wearing suits and facial markers so their movements and expressions can be digitally captured and turned into animated characters. Virtual production involves actors performing on set, often in front of massive LED screens instead of a green screen while real-time game-engine graphics create the environment around them, blending the physical and digital worlds during the shoot. Luma’s tools, Erwin said, allow them to film a human actor anywhere and then transport that to a photorealistic scene, or go even further by generating a new face so it looks like a completely different person but still maps onto the actor’s movements and facial expressions. Topics AI, AI video generation, film, Hollywood, innovative dreams, Luma, Media & Entertainment, wonder project Rebecca Bellan Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications. You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.
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