Luma launches AI-powered studio for religious content production

AI video generation startup Luma has introduced 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 of this collaboration will be a show titled "The Old Stories: Moses," featuring British actor Ben Kingsley, set to premiere this spring on Prime Video.

Luma stated that Innovative Dreams is a production services company where experienced filmmakers from director Jon Erwin's team and Luma's creative technologists work with major studios and filmmakers to bring ambitious ideas to life. The company envisions creative teams collaborating in real-time with Luma's tools to make changes to sets, props, and lighting, as well as integrate footage of human actors.

Luma Agents are the company's recently launched tools designed to handle the entire creative process across text, images, video, and audio. "This is a significant improvement over the current virtual production and performance capture processes where everything comes together only in post-production," the company noted. "This is the leverage of AI — not just faster or cheaper, but better than what came before."

However, Luma is not the only startup transitioning from tooling to production. Last week, AI startup Higgsfield launched an original series, starting with a 10-minute sci-fi episode, while London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is working on a documentary with Campfire Studios. The launch of Innovative Dreams coincided with comments from Runway's co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela, who suggested that film studios should take the $100 million they spend on a single film and instead use AI to produce 50 films to increase their chances of creating a blockbuster.

Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has echoed similar sentiments, arguing that Hollywood's rising production costs have made filmmaking increasingly constrained. He believes generative AI could make filmmaking faster, cheaper, and more efficient without sacrificing quality. This thinking underpins Luma's new partnership with Wonder Project, which was launched in 2023 and is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten, aiming to serve the faith and values audience globally.

Wonder Project's 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 focus solely on religious content or expand beyond Wonder's remit. In a video promoting the partnership, Erwin stated that Innovative Dreams will utilize a new "real-time hybrid filmmaking" process that combines performance capture (as seen in "Avatar") and virtual production (as in "The Mandalorian"), performed live and more cost-effectively 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 noted, allow them to film a human actor anywhere and then transport that to a photorealistic scene or even generate a new face to make it look like a completely different person while still mapping onto the actor's movements and facial expressions.