Luma unveils AI-powered production studio and faith-centered Wonder Project

Luma, an AI video generation startup, has launched Innovative Dreams—a production company created in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and TV shows on Amazon Prime.

The first project from this collaboration is titled “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley, and it is scheduled to premiere this spring on Prime Video.

Luma stated in a Thursday social media post: “Innovative Dreams is a production services company where experienced filmmakers from Director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists collaborate with leading studios and filmmakers to bring ambitious ideas to life.”

The company envisions creative teams working in real time with Luma Agents to adjust sets, props, and lighting, and to integrate footage of human actors. Luma Agents are the company's recently launched tools designed to manage end-to-end creative tasks across text, image, video, and audio.

Luma’s post added: “This represents a major advancement over current virtual production and performance capture methods, where elements only come together in post-production. This is the power of AI—not just faster or cheaper, but better than what existed before.”

Luma is not the only startup shifting from tool development to production. Last week, AI startup Higgsfield launched an original series, beginning with a 10-minute sci-fi episode. Meanwhile, London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is collaborating with Campfire Studios on a documentary.

The announcement coincided with competitor Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela suggesting that film studios should take the $100 million they allocate to a single film and instead use AI to produce 50 films, thereby increasing their odds of creating a blockbuster.

Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has echoed a similar view, telling TechCrunch that rising production costs in Hollywood have increasingly constrained filmmaking. He argues that generative AI can make filmmaking faster, cheaper, and more efficient without compromising quality.

This perspective underpins Luma’s new partnership with Wonder Project.

Wonder Project, launched in 2023, is led by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten, with a mission to serve a global faith and values audience. Their first project, House of David—a Biblical drama series about the life of King David—was released on Amazon Prime in 2025.

It remains unclear whether Innovative Dreams will concentrate exclusively on religious and faith-based content or broaden its scope beyond Wonder Project’s domain. TechCrunch has reached out for clarification.

In a promotional video for the partnership, Erwin explained that Innovative Dreams will employ a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (as seen in “Avatar”) and virtual production (as seen in “The Mandalorian”), executed live and at lower cost using Luma’s tools.

Performance capture is a technique in which actors perform in a green-screen environment, wearing suits and facial markers that allow their movements and expressions to be digitally captured and transformed into animated characters. Virtual production, on the other hand, involves actors performing on set, often in front of large LED screens instead of a green screen, while real-time game-engine graphics generate the surrounding environment, blending physical and digital worlds during filming.

According to Erwin, Luma’s tools enable them to film a human actor anywhere and then transplant that performance into a photorealistic scene, or even go further by generating a new face that appears to be a completely different person while still mapping onto the actor's movements and facial expressions.