Luma AI launches Wonder Project studio: Moses film with Ben Kingsley to premiere on Prime Video

Luma AI, known for its Dream Machine video generator, announced the launch of its own production studio Wonder Project. Its focus is content with spiritual and religious themes. The first project will be a full-length film about Moses starring Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley.

Release is scheduled for spring on Amazon Prime Video. Wonder Project is positioned as the world's first AI production studio specializing in faith narratives—stories that draw inspiration from religious texts and spiritual traditions. The target audience is believers worldwide who have historically experienced a lack of quality content aligned with their values.

According to analysts, faith-based cinema in the US consistently generates between $500 million and $1 billion per year with relatively low production budgets—making the niche attractive to investors in an era when traditional Hollywood studios are cutting costs. Ben Kingsley—an actor with an Oscar statuette for his role as Mahatma Gandhi in the film "Gandhi" (1982), with an extensive filmography in historical epics—lends the project necessary artistic weight. His participation signals that Wonder Project aims not at a cheap product for a narrow audience, but at cinema with aspirations for broad recognition.

The story of Moses is one of the most frequently adapted biblical narratives: from the classic version with Charlton Heston in 1956 to the animated "The Prince of Egypt" in 1998. Wonder Project will compete with this legacy. Luma AI was founded in 2021 and initially specialized in 3D reconstruction using Neural Radiance Fields technology.

In 2024, the company released Dream Machine—one of the first publicly available high-quality text-to-video generators, quickly gaining popularity among content creators. The launch of Wonder Project is a fundamentally different strategic move: from a B2C tool to full-fledged studio production, where AI serves not as the final product, but as a filmmaking tool. The choice of Amazon Prime Video as the distribution platform indicates that an agreement has already been made.

Prime Video is actively expanding its library in niches traditionally undervalued by Netflix: religious cinema, regional content, family stories. In recent years, Amazon has acquired several faith-based projects, apparently responding to data about subscriber behavior in certain demographic groups. Wonder Project marks a qualitative shift in the application of generative AI in the media industry.

Until now, AI tools have been used primarily at the level of visual effects or short advertising content. A full-fledged studio project with a renowned actor and a contract with a major streamer is a new precedent. If the film proves commercially successful, it could trigger a wave of similar projects: AI radically reduces production costs, and the religious audience has historically remained one of the most loyal and solvent in world cinema.