Despite years of breathless predictions that generative AI would transform moviemaking, the industry has yet to produce a genuinely AI-made project worth pointing to — until now, perhaps. According to The Verge, a film called Dear Upstairs Neighbors, screened at Tribeca 2026, offers a glimpse of what that future might actually look like.
The project didn't rely on simply typing descriptions into off-the-shelf AI tools. Instead, its creators used concept art developed specifically for the film to train custom versions of Google's Veo video model and Imagen image model — both built by Google DeepMind. The result is a workflow that is less about prompting a generic system and more about teaching a model the specific visual language of a particular project.
According to The Verge, this distinction matters enormously. Vanilla generative AI tools produce outputs that tend to look and feel like everything else generated by those same tools — a kind of visual sameness that creative professionals find limiting. Custom-trained models, by contrast, can internalize the aesthetic choices, character designs, and tonal qualities that define a specific story.
The story matters because it reframes the debate around AI in Hollywood: the real question isn't whether filmmakers will use AI, but how — and the answer emerging from projects like this one suggests that serious creative applications will require significant upfront investment in training, not just a subscription and a clever prompt.