Nikola Todorovic didn't grow up dreaming of Hollywood. He grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the shadow of war, where stories felt less like entertainment and more like a way to survive. Storytelling was an escape, he says, but also something closer to therapy, a way of making sense of things he didn't yet have words for.
He was 20 the first time he met a producer, and he remembers trying to extract every scrap of knowledge from the conversation, because he'd spent his entire life up to that point without access to anyone who could open a door for him. That experience left him with a lasting frustration: that being a great storyteller has so often required moving to LA, begging for permission, raising money, and hoping someone lets you make your film. Concentrate that much control over who gets to tell stories, he believes, and you're not far from propaganda.
Todorovic is co-founder of Flow Studio, the AI filmmaking company partnered with Autodesk, and he talks about generative tools less like a technologist and more like someone settling an old score.
AI can fix a broken film industry
He likes to point out how strange the industry's economics have become. He remembers walking through San Francisco with his co-founder, comparing notes on film budgets against the buildings around them – a hospital costs roughly $20 million to build, he tells me, while a film can cost ten times that and still flop in a weekend. "Absolutely insane," he calls it, evidence, in his view, of an industry whose economics have come detached from any reasonable connection to what things cost to make. He compares it to Spielberg's ET, made for around $4 million and considered a major production at the time, versus the $300 million now routinely spent on a streaming film.
Against this broken system, Todorovic sees AI tools in filmmaking, such as Flow Studio’s 3D Editor + Canvas or MotionMaker in Maya, as a way to rebel, to reset and find a new way of doing things, with new filmmakers able to find their voice. He explains his context: at the start of the 20th century, Thomas Edison's company held a monopoly on motion picture cameras and on the Nickelodeon theatres where films were shown – "because they literally cost a nickel to watch". If you wanted to make or screen a film, you paid Edison a license fee. A generation of directors and producers, tired of the arrangement, looked for somewhere to escape it, and found a small farm town in California.
"They moved there because they were like, 'okay, I can shoot on a beach, I can shoot in the US'," Todorovic explains. "But most importantly, it took forever to come by train across the country. By the time the lawyers came to shut down the production, they were already done. And the California judges were much more lenient." The first Hollywood studios, in other words, were founded by indie producers fleeing a monopoly on storytelling.
"I always found that so fascinating," he says, "because it's kind of history repeating itself, always." The indies who built Hollywood to escape one monopoly eventually built their own – first over distribution, once they owned the theatres, then over production, once budgets climbed into the hundreds of millions. Streaming broke the distribution monopoly. Todorovic thinks AI is about to break the production one.
"What I think is going to happen now – we're going to cut production costs from hundreds of millions of dollars," he says. "Honestly, we can cut it by 95, 99%."
Speaking as a former VFX artist…
Todorovic doesn't pretend the ending is a utopia. "When that happens, there's going to be so much content that it's going to be all about discovery," he says. "This is where I think studios will still dominate, because they're going to have marketing dollars." He reaches for the Spotify comparison: anyone can make an album in a bedroom now, and almost nobody hears it, because the bottleneck didn't disappear; it just moved further downstream.
During our conversation, the prospect of, and scale of, a potential Anthropic IPO comes up – because America is obsessed right now – what it could mean for San Francisco, then pivots, in the same breath, to the fact that the film industry has never had an equivalent moment for the people at the bottom of a call sheet – "no stock, no upside, just the next job if you're lucky", he adds.
For Todorovic, VFX artists and artists below the line in general "get hit the hardest." Blamed if a film fails – poor VFX – and rarely credited for a success, the way a director is. He's speaking from experience: Todorovic began his career as a VFX artist and compositor, and says he arrived expecting real creative input and found mostly what he calls grunt work, matching someone else's instructions to the pixel.
He's still visibly frustrated by productions that publicise how little CGI they used as a selling point, while the several hundred VFX artists who spent months working long hours on the film go unmentioned. To him, that's not a badge of authenticity; instead, it's several hundred people's work being erased for a marketing line. He says these are people who already absorbed the pandemic and a strike before AI arrived as a third hit, and the anger toward AI makes sense to him, even though, as he puts it, the technology itself had nothing to do with any of that.
It's okay to be angry about AI
He's not trying to talk anyone out of being angry. He just doesn't think it changes the outcome, because he's watched this fight before. The film industry, he points out, exists downstream of a technological upheaval itself – starting with the invention of the camera. Sound was fought as the death of "real" film. A Disney studio head is said to have waved off the idea of 3D animation when John Lasseter pitched the tech, reportedly asking why he'd bother if it cost the same as what he already had. The iPhone-shot indie film Tangerine drew scepticism for using a phone camera; Todorovic says that within a few minutes of watching it, he'd forgotten how it was shot and simply cared whether the story worked.
Every technological leap in this industry has met resistance before settling in, he suggests, whether it's cameras, sound, computer animation, or now AI filmmaking tools.
If he's right that studios end up dominating the discovery layer the way they once dominated the theatres, because marketing budgets, not production budgets, become the scarce resource, then that's not a new problem AI has created. It's the same cycle finding its next foothold: indies break a monopoly, then build one of their own, and someone eventually escapes that one too.
The question Todorovic can't answer is how long this round lasts before the next Hollywood shows up. Asked when the field settles into a new monopoly, because on his own telling it always has before, he doesn't offer a year, a milestone, or a hedge dressed up as an answer. "We just don't know when that is yet," he says, and leaves it there, but after speaking with Todorovic, one thing is clear: he believes AI will open the door to new filmmakers and, importantly, new stories.
Take a look at Flow Studio on the Autodesk blog.
