
L-R: Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder and the New York Film Festival’s Dennis Lim
Jill Goldsmith/Deadline
It’s an auspicious day when I catch up with the Wonder Studios boys: Xavier Collins and Justin Hackney have literally just moved the company into new offices inside a converted neo-Gothic church in East London. Though the church is home, it is not a place of worship in the traditional sense, but Wonder does believe in the higher power of artificial intelligence.
Collins and Hackney founded Wonder a year ago with a mission to become the A24 of AI production. Since then, the company has raised $15 million to hit a $50 million valuation, collaborated with Lewis Capaldi (and another, as-yet unnamed music superstar), run an AI filmmaking scheme mentored by Danny Boyle, developed production workflow technology, and produced re-creation scenes for The Real Wolf of Wall Street, an upcoming documentary about Jordan Belfort. And that’s just the stuff they have permission to share. “It’s exceeded expectations,” Collins says.
Collins came up through the tech world, via spells at firms including Deliveroo. Hackney has mixed filmmaking with new tech during a career that included a spell at ElevenLabs, the AI audio company. They met when Collins collaborated with ElevenLabs to re-create the voice of Alain Dorval, the French actor who dubbed for Sylvester Stallone. Over rosé in Cannes, they decided to launch Wonder.
If Collins is the funding whisperer, landing investors like Atomico and ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski, Hackney is at the creative coalface with AI models. Raising cash is never straightforward, but Collins says it has been like “playing on easy mode” when Wonder showcases its work, as with Capaldi’s “Something in the Heavens” music video.
The haunting song is complemented by AI visuals of water enveloping those seeking out loved ones in the afterlife. Produced using Google tools, the video has amassed 1.6 million views and 26,000 likes, meaning it dodged the opprobrium some AI endeavors face on YouTube. Hackney says 15 artists worked on the video, but “not a single shot” could have been filmed traditionally within the video’s budget.
What does he make of AI skepticism? “It’s about showing the creative unlocks,” Hackney says, adding that “if you’re not getting friction online, maybe you’re not doing something right.”
Collins chimes in: “There’s always going to be reticence from certain people, but we’ve leaned in where we felt the pull.” He adds that the demand for AI content is only going to grow. “We’re all in this small boat trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean,” he said. “There’s a trillion-dollar industry on the other side.”
The ambition is to make an AI feature film, perhaps even with Boyle, who mentored the Black Mirror-style YouTube anthology series Beyond the Loop (Season 2 is coming in 2026). But Collins prefers to speak in grander terms about Wonder’s vision.
“We could be one of the defining entertainment companies of the future,” he evangelizes. Welcome to the church of Wonder.
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Production company Anonymous Content is entering a new era where they are looking to become a financier in the film marketplace, rather than just a “fee-for-hire production company,” which will allow them to finance their own projects.
For one of the new projects, announced during the Bloomberg Screentime conference Thursday, Anonymous has commissioned author Nicholas Boggs, to write the script for a feature film adaptation of Boggs’ Baldwin: A Love Story, along with his partner, author Marlon James, author of The Disappearers. The project will be co-produced with Higher Ground.
Additionally, the company, backed by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, said it will look to move into live events including Broadway and potentially move into the content creation space. This comes after the Emerson Collective made a “material investment” in the company in January, alongside Walker’s appointment as CEO.
“So there’s no doubt that the content creators, these independent content creators, figuring out how to have a portal to that community, that community of writers, that community of creators in places that we don’t normally go, and making sure we have team members who can have tentacles in those places,” Walker said. “And then looking at things like theatrical, and looking at different ways for us to work. And when I say theatrical, I mean Broadway. I mean live events.”
As part of this new era, under Walker, who joined in January after serving as the president of the Ford Foundation, the company is also reconstituting the board, with Jobs joining as a board member, alongside former HBO CEO Richard Plepler.
“We have been a fee-for-hire production company. We have not invested for the most part. We have not been lead, in part because we haven’t invested. The board now and Emerson has made it possible for us to become a financier in the market, so we’ll be able to co-finance, finance, take the lead in financing in film,” Walker said.
“It’s necessary because fee-for-service is a bad way to build a company,” Jobs added.
They added that this will mean the balance sheet for the company will increase, but that the company will have “an envelope” with which to make the financing decisions.
“It’s is a slight, subtle change in priorities when you look for excellence, when you look for the highest quality, when you look for material that moves humans and touches us and stays inside us and reminds us of what we’re capable of, if that’s your number one, and then making money is number two, then you actually end up making films that people really want to see that,” Jobs said.
More to come.
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“I guess we should just start at the beginning, and tell us how this happened,” New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim asked filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim at a Q&A after a screening of You Can See Everything on Wednesday night.
It was the second public showing of the documentary, which was filmed in and over years and blew the roof off the Telluride Film Festival (see Deadline review). It’s a hard-to-describe flow of verité filmmaking unspooling in real time at the San Diego home of disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she reported to Bryan federal prison in Texas. The Stanford dropout and Theranos founder is still serving a 10-year sentence for defrauding investors in the high-profile case.
Fielder and Oppenheim said the project, oddly, was launched during a magic show the two friends attended in L.A. in 2023, at the height of Holmes’ notoriety. “A magician there asked for a celebrity’s name, and someone called out ‘Elizabeth Holmes’,” Oppenhiem said. “I was like, so interesting. Elizabeth Holmes.” He said he “had just heard that she was looking for someone to document her life and that she had reached out to A24.”
Fielder was also curious. “I knew that she hadn’t… spoken to anyone in, I think, seven years. Total silence.” He didn’t necessarily see a documentary brewing “because it felt like the story was very told. But I was really curious to meet her, just as a personal thing.”
Holmes’ epic rise and fall was the subject of an HBO documentary and a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried.
Fielder called A24, and went to meet Holmes. “I remember having this weird experience… where I’m like, “She seems so genuine at times. But then I’m like, no… I know she’s a liar… It was a weird mental thing.” Homes has always insisted she did nothing wrong.
She agreed to let the cameras into the home she shares with with her partner Billy Evans and their two young children.
Fielder made no promises to A24. “We don’t know what the story is. But we want to see what happens,” he said. The studio said, “‘OK, that’s fine. And if you want to pull the plug anytime, you can.’ Which was amazing.”

L-R: Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder and the New York Film Festival’s Dennis Lim
Jill Goldsmith/Deadline
They started filming. “And after, Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there, and we’d completely disagree on… what we thought was happening. And we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting, if we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”
The filmmakers ultimately moved from one camera to three, shooting 16 hours a day with two small crews of which no more than four individuals were in the house at any one time. “We had a wide lens that would cover the whole house so if something happened, we wouldn’t miss it. And then the other two … lenses could be wide but then also zoom, so we could basically capture everything,” said Oppenheim.
“We were trying… essentially, to just take all the pressure away from any moment, so they wouldn’t really know what we were interested in necessarily.”
“Actually, we didn’t always either,” Fielder added.
“One thing we realized with the [initial] one camera that’s panning, which you see in some of the earlier scenes, is that the moment you say something to someone you want to see their face the moment they hear it. Especially in a movie like this, where you’re trying to evaluate if someone’s being honest or not. And when you have to swing, you’re missing a few seconds. And you realize this is maybe a problem in this kind of thing,” Fielder said.
He himself went from solely behind the camera to very much on, registering reactions to Holmes, including to her circular responses to questions like did she know her claims about Theranos’ blood-testing kit were false.
Fielder said he has no idea why she and Evans granted them the access they did.
“It’s so hard to understand… Maybe there was a sense that inviting someone who was a friend of theirs, no one would take that seriously. So I don’t know. It’s so hard to speculate as to why.”
You Can See Everything opens in theaters October 16.
“I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder said. “Why I’m excited for the movie to come out is I’m really curious to hear what everyone else thinks and what they make of certain things. I think it will actually help me understand… So I’ve been looking forward to this release for a while.”
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River, the IFC title that Universal and Blumhouse acquired out of TIFF Midnight Madness for $10M, is getting a Friday, Jan. 15, 2027 theatrical release.
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