Roger Avary Brings 'Paradise Lost' to Life With AI at Ex Machina Studios

Oscar winning screenwriter Roger Avary will direct a cinematic adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost at Ex Machina Studios, using generative AI to build the scale the 17th century epic demands. Deadline reported the announcement on April 29, 2026, describing the production as using "cutting-edge generative AI to bring Milton's vision to life in ways unimaginable just a few years ago".

Avary won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction in 1995 and wrote the screenplay for Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf in 2007, which carried a $150 million production budget. Paradise Lost is positioned to match that scale at a fraction of the cost.

A Literary Epic Traditional Financing Could Not Touch

Milton's poem follows Satan's rebellion in Heaven and the fall of Adam and Eve. As a cinematic subject, it sits in the category of projects that major studios have circled and abandoned for decades: the scale is immense, the source material is in the public domain, and the theology makes studio marketing departments nervous. No major adaptation has made it to production.

AI changes the cost equation. Ex Machina Studios' producers described the production as "preserving the primacy of real actors, human-authored narratives, and guild-aligned production practices" while using AI for world building. The distinction matters: the AI is building the environments, not replacing the cast.

Avary's Argument for AI Production

Avary addressed the financing logic directly in a Variety interview that ran alongside coverage of his earlier AI work. He had said it was "almost impossible" to get films made through traditional studio routes for the better part of two decades. Repositioning his projects at the intersection of creative storytelling and AI technology attracted investor capital that had eluded him through conventional channels.

"Powerful storytelling doesn't require blockbuster budgets, but the right tools and team", he said in the Deadline announcement. The statement doubles as an argument to the industry: creative ambition does not scale down with the budget when AI is handling the production design.

The Ex Machina Studios Model

This project is separate from Avary's earlier AI pivot through General Cinema Dynamics, where he announced three unnamed films in active production in February 2026. Paradise Lost at Ex Machina Studios is a named, prestige literary project with a public announcement and a specific creative framework. The specific AI platform Ex Machina uses was described as proprietary and was not named in the Deadline or Variety coverage.

No release date, cast, or director of photography has been announced.

What Sets This Apart

The combination of elements here has no direct precedent. An Academy Award winner adapting a canonical work of Western literature at blockbuster scale, using AI not as a marketing tag but as the actual production mechanism for building Heaven, Hell, and the War in Heaven on screen. No other filmmaker at Avary's level has publicly committed to a project of this scope with this dependency on AI world building as the primary tool.

Milton's Paradise Lost has drawn directors from Fritz Lang to Ridley Scott over the decades, none of whom reached production on an adaptation. The reason was always the same: the cost of realizing it on screen. Avary is making a specific claim that AI has retired that objection.

Whether the project closes financing and reaches production will depend on guild negotiations around the specific methodology and investor appetite for a prestige literary subject. For now, it is the clearest signal yet of where AI in filmmaking is heading: not short films or VFX cleanup, but literary epics that traditional production economics made impossible.

Filmmakers testing what AI world building looks like in practice can explore the tools at AI FILMS Studio.

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Sources

Deadline | Variety