$1.5 Million AI Christmas Film Seeks Distributor After $80 Million Estimate
A two-hour Christmas fantasy made with artificial intelligence for $1.5 million is now searching for a distributor.
The film is "Merry the Christmas Witch", based on a 2012 children's book by Bobbi Hess, a 70-year-old technical writer based in New Orleans, as reported by Variety on 12 October 2026. Its director and co-writer is Tom Walsh, chief executive of TW3 Entertainment. Walsh first came across the book in 2014, when Hess's late husband handed him a copy during a meeting in Los Angeles.
Walsh had priced the story as a traditional production at $80 million. The saving is stark. The finished AI version cost $1.5 million, according to the same report.
About 50 people worked on the film over a 10-month production cycle. The production involved AI studio Phatty Acid, and used ElevenLabs for voice generation and Seedance and Nanobanana for video generation. Those are software tools that create spoken dialogue and moving images from text prompts and other inputs.
Human actors were hired to record the script to guide character movement and sound. The makers then switched to AI-generated voices because of syncing problems, where the sound did not match the mouth movements on screen.
The story centres on Merry, the first witch born on Christmas Day, who must defeat a coven of evil witches that has kidnapped Santa Claus to destroy Christmas. Project notes place the tale in the bayous of Louisiana, the marshy waterways of the southern United States, where the baby born on Christmas Day is named Merry by the Coven and is now sixteen years old, according to TW3 Entertainment.
What makes this stand out is the arithmetic. A small crew and off-the-shelf AI tools carried a full-length fantasy from book to finished film without a studio behind it.
The film currently has no distributor. It was originally envisioned as a traditional live-action production, according to an August announcement carried by Freep.
