AI Video Startup Luma Launches AI-Powered Production Venture Innovative Dreams With Faith-Based Streamer Wonder Project

AI-generated video startup Luma has launched Innovative Dreams, a full production company built in a joint partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming outfit that develops faith-based and religious film and television content for Amazon Prime Video.

The new joint venture’s first title will launch this spring on Prime Video: The Old Stories: Moses, a scripted series starring acclaimed British actor Ben Kingsley.

In a social media announcement published Thursday, Luma explained that Innovative Dreams operates as a production services firm that pairs veteran filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s team with Luma’s in-house creative technologists. The company partners with major studios and independent creators to help bring large, ambitious creative visions to life that would be constrained by traditional production workflows.

The startup’s operating model lets creative teams collaborate in real time with Luma Agents, its recently launched suite of end-to-end generative AI tools that work across text, images, video, and audio. Teams can adjust sets, props, and lighting on the fly, and seamlessly integrate footage of live human actors into AI-generated projects.

Per Luma’s announcement, this real-time workflow marks a major improvement over existing virtual production and performance capture pipelines, which only fully come together during the post-production stage. “This is the leverage of AI — not just faster or cheaper, but better than what came before,” the company wrote.

Luma is far from the only generative AI startup shifting from building backend creative tools to producing original content directly. Just last week, AI startup Higgsfield launched its first original series, kicking off with a 10-minute sci-fi episode. Meanwhile, London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is currently collaborating with Campfire Studios on an AI-assisted documentary.

The launch of Innovative Dreams comes the same week that Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and co-CEO of top Luma competitor Runway, made waves with comments on AI’s role in Hollywood. Valenzuela argued that major studios should redirect the $100 million they typically spend on a single big-budget feature, and instead use AI to produce 50 smaller projects — a strategy he says would drastically boost studios’ odds of landing a breakout blockbuster.

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Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has echoed similar arguments about AI’s transformative potential for Hollywood, telling TechCrunch that skyrocketing production costs have left mainstream filmmaking increasingly constrained. Generative AI, he argues, can make the entire filmmaking process faster, cheaper, and more efficient — all without sacrificing creative or production quality.

This core belief is what underpins Luma’s new partnership with Wonder Project. Launched in 2023, Wonder Project is led by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten, with a mission to serve global audiences seeking faith and values-aligned entertainment. The studio’s first project, House of David, a biblical drama series about the life of King David, launched on Amazon Prime in 2025.

It remains unclear whether Innovative Dreams will focus exclusively on religious and faith-based content, or expand beyond Wonder Project’s core niche to serve other content categories. TechCrunch has reached out to the partners for additional clarification on the venture’s long-term scope.

In a promotional video for the new joint venture, Erwin explained that Innovative Dreams will use a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that blends performance capture (the technology used in the Avatar franchise) and virtual production (pioneered on The Mandalorian), powered by Luma’s AI tools to complete work live at a far lower cost than traditional workflows.

For context, traditional performance capture has actors perform in a green-screen environment while wearing motion-capture suits and facial markers, so their movements and expressions can be digitally recorded and mapped to animated characters. Virtual production, by contrast, has actors perform on a physical set, most often in front of massive LED screens instead of a green screen, with real-time game-engine graphics rendering the surrounding environment to blend physical and digital elements during the actual shoot.

Erwin added that Luma’s AI tools unlock far more flexibility than these legacy methods. The technology lets production teams film a human actor anywhere, then drop that performance into a fully generated photorealistic digital scene. Teams can even go a step further, generating an entirely new face that aligns perfectly with the original actor’s live movements and facial expressions, resulting in a performance that looks like it comes from a completely different performer.