The Studio Behind Roger Avary's AI Film Is Now Building a TV Slate
Ex Machina, the AI studio behind Roger Avary and Alex Proyas's upcoming films, is launching its first TV project, the AI-generated series Kira.
Ex Machina Studios, the AI-oriented production company behind upcoming features from Roger Avary and Alex Proyas, is launching its first TV project. The entirely AI-generated series Kira heads to MIPCOM in Cannes this October, where sales partner K5 International will begin pre-sales to international buyers.
What Kira Actually Is
Kira is a six-part epic drama created and directed by French filmmaking duo Damien Steck and Julien Petit, previously behind the Tribeca entry Cherry. Ex Machina co-founder and CEO Marco Weber, whose producing credits include Igby Goes Down, is executive producing. The synopsis: on the far-future living planet Djena, a young girl named Kira navigates rival factions to find her missing father and restore balance to her world.
Production is described as starting shortly, with pre-sales launching at MIPCOM, which runs October 12–15 in Cannes. That's a sales-market debut, not a confirmed straight-to-series order from a network or streamer.
The Bigger Ex Machina Push
Kira isn't happening in isolation. Ex Machina already has two AI-produced features moving through the pipeline: Roger Avary's Paradise Lost, an adaptation of Milton's epic poem, and Alex Proyas' Heaven, a dark satire the company has compared to Brazil. Both films landed a theatrical distribution deal with Mayfair Media Group covering more than 1,500 screens across major North American cities, with Paradise Lost slated for 2027 and Heaven following that summer.
Ex Machina describes its approach as pairing human-centered narratives and performances with a proprietary AI-enabled production stack, aimed at building large-scale worlds at controlled budgets. The company has stated plans to release around four projects in 2027, scaling to roughly six films annually under the Mayfair agreement. Kira represents the company's first move from film into television using the same underlying approach.
Competitive Context
A handful of established filmmakers, Steven Soderbergh, Mathieu Kassovitz, Robert Rodriguez, and Paul Schrader among them, have publicly explored AI tools for cost control on passion projects that might not otherwise get greenlit. Ex Machina is different in scale and structure: rather than one filmmaker experimenting with AI on a single film, it's built a company explicitly organized around AI production, with a confirmed theatrical pipeline and now a television arm. That's a meaningfully larger bet than any individual director's experiment.
The Signal in the Noise
Kira is a real test of whether AI-generated content can move beyond passion-project features into television markets where buyers are evaluating a series purely on the strength of concept art and a pitch. MIPCOM will be the first real signal of whether international broadcasters and streamers are willing to commit to a series with no live-action production behind it. Sales interest there, or the lack of it, will say more about the format's commercial viability than either Paradise Lost or Heaven has been able to so far, since neither has completed production yet.
Would broadcaster interest in a fully AI-generated series change how you think about where this technology is actually headed in the next few years?
What You Need to Know
- Series: Kira, 6-part epic drama, entirely AI-generated
- Creators/directors: Damien Steck, Julien Petit (also credited as writers)
- Executive producer: Marco Weber, Ex Machina co-founder/CEO
- Sales partner: K5 International
- Market debut: MIPCOM, Cannes, October 12–15, 2026
- Related Ex Machina slate: Paradise Lost (Roger Avary, Easter 2027), Heaven (Alex Proyas, summer 2027)
- Theatrical partner: Mayfair Media Group, 1,500+ screens across North America
