Amazon MGM Studios Launches AI Production Fund, Greenlights Three Animated Series for Prime Video

Amazon MGM Studios is making one of the entertainment industry's most direct institutional bets on generative AI as a production tool, announcing a new funding initiative that has already resulted in three animated series orders for Prime Video and a proprietary AI platform being positioned as the first of its kind built specifically for professional visual storytelling. The announcement was made Wednesday at the 2026 AI on the Lot event at Culver Studios.

The initiative, called the GenAI Creators' Fund, provides selected filmmakers, digital creators and technology startups with both financial support and access to AI production tools for developing premium television and film projects. Developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services, the studio's sister organization on the technology side, the fund sits alongside a new AI production platform called Project Nara, which is being made available exclusively to creators selected for the program. Amazon MGM Studios chief operating officer Albert Cheng was careful to frame the initiative in terms that push back against the most common anxieties surrounding AI in Hollywood. "The most important thing to remember is, we're human-centric," he told Variety. "AI tools are meant to empower human creativity, and allow TV shows and movies that would not have been possible before." In all projects developed under the fund, he confirmed, creators are working with human actors and voice actors.

The three animated series greenlit under the fund represent a range of creative backgrounds and target audiences. "Punky Duck," from Jorge R. Gutierrez, the writer-director of 20th Century Studios' "The Book of Life" and creator of the Nickelodeon series "El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera" and Netflix's "Maya and the Three", follows a punk duck and his companion Smiley Cat as they stumble through an exaggerated version of Los Angeles, colliding with alien invasions, giant monsters, robot criminal conspiracies, telenovela-style family drama and supernatural chaos. "Love, Diana Music Hunters," developed by Albie Hecht at pocket.watch, is built around Diana, described as the most-followed girl on YouTube; the series follows a young K-pop band of space-traveling musicians who travel to Planet Goo to perform a concert and restore music to a population of endangered aliens. Hecht previously served as president of Nickelodeon, where he oversaw the development of "SpongeBob SquarePants," and currently serves as chief content officer at pocket.watch. The third series, "Cupcake & Friends," comes from BuzzFeed Studios and centers on a cupcake character and her friends navigating the unexpected complications of a sleepover. No premiere dates have been set for any of the three.

Amazon MGM Studios is also developing a live-action short with an additional creator through the fund, though Cheng declined to identify that project or its creator. The grants themselves are structured as support for proof-of-concept pilots and short-form work; the studio then determines which projects warrant a full greenlight. Cheng also declined to specify the dollar amounts being distributed to fund recipients.

Project Nara, the AI platform at the center of the initiative, is described by the companies as a collaborative workspace designed for production teams. Rather than replacing the software pipelines that professional animators and filmmakers already rely on, it is built to integrate AI production tools alongside existing applications including Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine and Adobe's suite of products. The platform operates on what the companies call a "model-agnostic architecture," meaning it draws on a combination of third-party video models and proprietary systems rather than locking creators into a single AI provider. It also incorporates what Amazon describes as provenance tracking, a mechanism for protecting intellectual property throughout the production process, addressing one of the central legal and ethical concerns that has surrounded generative AI's use in creative industries.

Cheng was pointed about one of the core problems the platform is designed to solve. "One of the biggest complaints we hear from creators is: AI will not do what you want it to do," he said. Generative AI video systems currently on the market, he argued, are built around the demands of social media content rather than professional production, and Project Nara represents an attempt to reorient those underlying models toward industry-grade use. Among the practical promises attached to the platform: reduced total production costs, faster timelines, and the ability for directors to visualize specific scenes earlier in the process, before principal photography begins, allowing for creative adjustments that would otherwise have to happen on set at considerably greater expense. To test those promises, the three initial series partners were given a five-week deadline to complete their pilots. "To prove it can be done quickly," Cheng said.

Samira Panah Bakhtiar, general manager of media, entertainment, games and sports for AWS, pointed to Amazon's dual identity as both a studio and a technology company as the distinguishing factor in what the initiative can offer. "Amazon has quietly and methodically assembled the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry, spanning from infrastructure to creative tools to distribution and funding of creative content," she said. "Project Nara illustrates how AWS can help filmmakers of all kinds bring AI to the full creative pipeline, from concept to screen." The announcement arrives at a moment when Hollywood's relationship with artificial intelligence remains deeply contested, between studios exploring efficiency gains and guilds guarding against displacement, making Amazon's willingness to put its name and funding behind a program explicitly built around generative AI one of the more consequential institutional moves the industry has seen on the subject.