We started Wonder Studios in January 2025. Backed by some of the world’s best investors, we’re now a team of 35+ based around the world with offices in London, LA, NYC and SF.
What is Wonder Studios
A24 won brand, Wonder will win community.
At Wonder we’re building a company that is creator first and structurally different from the studios that have come before us.
Those studios succeeded and scaled in a world of scarce and expensive production infrastructure, centralised distribution, and legacy talent pipelines. We believe that world is changing and we’re building a business - designed from first principles - for this new era.
Wonder has a production engine that gets faster with every project, a talent network with incentives aligned to ours, and a catalogue of owned IP that appreciates in value with time.
Why now: Macro Trends that Serve as Tailwinds
1. The Time of the Barbell
On one side, AI is going to radically disrupt the biggest areas of the economy. Areas with towering costs and legacy overheads: hardware, healthcare, legal, finance, entertainment etc…outsized industries where adoption of AI could have outsized outcomes.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, value is going to flow where AI can’t reach. Assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology; live events, community, tangible and tactile experiences.
Wonder is built across both and leans into each side of this barbell.
For the traditional entertainment and advertising industry, Wonder serves as a bridge to the technology that will unlock production value, greenlight projects, and shift the economics of creator ownership. From advertising to filmmaking, there is a trillion dollar creative industry and AI workflows have only just begun to scratch the surface of how content is made.
Yet, this is only part of what excites us. What also powers Wonder is the talent density that lives within The Wonder App - a community focused on creativity, connectivity, and celebrating the moments AI won’t replace. From Wonder Sessions to screenings, hangouts to intimate concerts - we’re committed to fostering the ecosystem where AI can’t reach that will usher in the next generation of creative talent. It’s a key reason why we invested in a reconstructed Church in East London and our partnership with Lighthouse Studios in LA and NY.
2. When production gets cheap, creators get power
Cinematic storytelling once required a traditional studio’s infrastructure to support films that cost millions to make and years to develop. Today, Hollywood-grade production is within reach of small teams with the right workflows - delivered in weeks, not months - and getting faster as AI takes over more of the production stack.
AI will not replace creativity - in a world of infinite content, quality and taste will become more valuable than ever.
At the same time, creators are increasingly reaching their fans directly - building their own audience on social media. Distribution is becoming democratised and social first (Substack, X, YouTube). These are macro trends happening across the industry and at every level. Netflix, Hulu, and the others will endure as a centre of gravity but the way new talent is incubated, discovered, and developed will be social first and direct-to-audience.
The companies that will define the next decade of entertainment are not the ones that try to rebuild the old model with AI bolted on, they are the ones that start AI-native and build new structures around it.
It’s for this reason we launched Beyond the Loop where filmmakers can become founders. In Season 2 we backed creators who have amassed over 3b views online and are pioneering a new vision of building IP in public.
3. Top creative talent is willing, for the first time, to work with AI in the loop.
The tooling is good enough, the cultural resistance has softened, and the economic case for working with an AI-native partner is now compelling rather than experimental.
In 2026, AI-made films qualified for Oscar consideration for the first time in history. Oscar-winning directors Michael Govier and Will McCormack, whose AI-assisted short qualified for the 2026 Oscars, said it plainly: “AI didn’t replace the artists, it amplified them.”
We’ve already been lucky enough to work with Academy award winning directors and major studios across the US and the UK - a signal of where the space is moving.
4. Service is the new software.
Value in AI will start to accrue to the companies that sell the work, not the ones that sell the tools. The spend on services dwarfs the spend on the software those services use and in the creative industry that ratio is roughly $15bn a year on software against $565bn on the production work itself.
When you look today at the huge addressable market from world-class advertising to blockbuster filmmaking, so little of this has been touched by the potential of AI. In the coming years this will change. The battleground over the next 3-5 years will be not at the tooling level but at the coal face of the day to day work using the tools - where traditional pipelines meet AI workflows.
Hybrid production will define the next era of content creation - and winning it is a question of craft and taste as much as APIs and tokens.
The Model: a vertically integrated Studio built for the AI era
Wonder is built as a flywheel.
Its three component parts are organised around two distinct populations and the engine that connects them. At the foundation sits Wonder’s supply: the creators who make the work. At the other side sits Wonder’s distribution: the audiences who consume it. In the middle sits the production engine that turns one into the other.
Our Community: Supply
Wonder was born from community and it’s this community of world class talent that underpins and guides all we do. As a business we are creator-first - it is this network that everything depends on. Directors, writers, AI-native filmmakers, VFX artists, technical creatives, and established Hollywood talent open to working AI-native. They are Wonder’s supply. This density of top-tier talent is Wonder’s hardest-to-replicate asset.
The Wonder App - community, education, jobs, discounts and more
Talent density attracts flagship clients and produces lighthouse work (we’ve now worked with everyone from Google through to the world’s biggest streamers and Hollywood studios). As Wonder scales, high quality output attracts more high quality talent - giving us access to the best emerging IP and making Wonder a destination for the tool and model providers wanting authentic and grassroots reach into the creative community.
Our Engine: Production
Where Wonder makes things. Three revenue streams - one team.
The agency: produces creative work for brands, platforms, and other studios on a fee-for-service basis.
Why it matters:
The agency generates cash flow that funds IP development
Flagship projects and lighthouse brands build Wonder’s brand and credibility
Complex projects gives our engineers continuous opportunities to refine production workflows that lower cost per minute (across the company).
Examples to date: Lewis Capaldi’s Something in the Heavens with YouTube & Google DeepMind, 1Rebel, Granola, Bayern Munich, BBC, Campfire Studios, and ElevenLabs.
Talent Management: allows us to feed valuable work back to our community and scale out the company without needing to drive the day to day operations of work we win.
The IP business: builds venture scale enterprise value.
There are three parts to our IP business: original content, co-production, and catalogue.
Original content gives Wonder owned IP and the ability to incubate the next generation of filmmaking talent.
Co-production gives us exposure to established audiences and de-risked revenue.
Catalogue - acquiring and reimagining undervalued IP with our AI-enabled production arm - is a longer-term bet on the library becoming the asset.
Our future: Distribution
One day fans will become more than who you distribute to - fans will back the projects they love and share in the upside. Economic participation in IP will flow from studios to creators and one day… to fans - all catalysed by falling production costs and direct-to-audience distribution.
This starts with Wonder TV - a curated space where top filmmakers can generate streaming upside and monetary rewards from their fans - these rails could become the future of how films are financed.
Wonder TV will do for filmmakers what Substack did for writers
The studios that defined the last 50 years were optimised for a world of scarce production infrastructure, centralised distribution, and linear talent pipelines. That world is ending.
What replaces it is not a more efficient version of the same model. It is something structurally different and creator first. One where the production engine gets faster as it scales, the talent network compounds due to aligned ownership incentives, and IP builds into a catalogue that appreciates over time. Wonder is building that company.
As we continue to build this vision in public alongside our community, we’d love to for you to join us.
Here’s how to get involved:
📱 Get the Wonder App → App Store · Google Play
📧 Get in Touch → hello@wonderstudios.com
It's a Wonderful future ahead!
Enjoyed this, thank you!