Howdy Storytellers 🤠,
We’re preparing to release the Movie Machine out of beta in the coming months. I am BEYOND excited. But not for the reason you think. Before I tell you why, I want to share with you the latest production made entirely with the Movie Machine.
We’ve been making drastic improvements to help storytellers like you make beautiful films with the Movie Machine easily and cost-effectively including improving audio consistency, shot continuity, and more.
Here’s the latest sci-fi film made using the Movie Machine 👇
We’re proud of this latest film. But this is far from a victory lap.
We are going all in to make the Movie Machine radically easier to use and make the outputs even better. We’re actively growing our team and running some incredibly fun experiments (which psst if you are a software engineer wanting to join our epic team in-person in San Francisco, drop us a line 😉).
Soon I’ll share with you what we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes to prepare for the public launch of the Movie Machine. But today, I want to share with you something much more important.
The Real Reason We Created The Movie Machine
You see – the goal of the Movie Machine by Creatorwood was never to help you turn your stories into movies and shows with AI. It’s to help you build a business selling movies and shows directly to viewers.
The original inspiration for Creatorwood came from me remembering my biggest dream at 15 years old. I wanted to make sci-fi movies and shows.
The problem?
These films had massive budgets (often $10 million+) and I was just a kid from South Carolina, who had no industry connections and no access to the producers and capital I’d need to bring my stories to life on screen.
So instead, I self-published my stories as novels.
I ended up writing and publishing 12 novels before I attended college, spending thousands of dollars out of pocket earned at my job as a server after school.
At the time, this was all I could ever see for myself.
Being an indie author means I didn’t need the permission of any gatekeepers to publish my stories. I could do this on my own terms and build my own business serving my readers.
It was my greatest dream.
Me at a book signing back in 2018. I looked a lot younger than I do now 😂
Until I realized a few things…
The book market is remarkably small compared to the rest of the media market (films make 10x more per year and games 20x more).
It’s not easy selling books. They are a high-friction media format – meaning that you don’t just randomly pick up a book on the side of the street (as opposed to you serendipitously discovering a new song on Spotify). Meanwhile, video is the language of the internet. We spend hours a day on average watching videos across various platforms – why couldn’t my stories become videos? Wouldn’t that make it easier for my stories to be discovered?
The best storytellers don’t sell their stories… they build worlds. When I worked on the strategy team at MrBeast I ended up discovering that a very small % of his revenue comes from ads and sponsorships. Instead, the lion’s share of MrBeast’s reported hundreds of millions in revenue come from selling products like Feastables and Lunchly. For the real storytelling empires… the business was never about the story… it was about the story building trust with audiences to build products and experiences beyond the screen.
It was these 3 realizations that got me obsessed with helping storytellers go beyond the book to build their own media empires (which I’ve filmed dozens of podcast episodes about on our YouTube Channel).
The conclusion? It’s time to tear down the gatekeepers everywhere, not just in book publishing.
We need to live in a world where anyone can create a story in any medium they imagine and build a business doing it. Crucially, this business is owned and operated by the storyteller – with them having control of their rights and a direct relationship to their audience (no more middleman, no more rights grabbing, no more taking power away from storytellers).
We need to live in a world where the storytellers with power aren’t those with access to connections, capital, and nepotism – but one where every storyteller can rule.
This ambition is what led to Creatorwood. With AI, we have a once in a generation opportunity to build a new entertainment industry from the ground-up. One that puts storytellers at the center, audiences first, and makes it possible for millions of stories to come to life and make money that never would have otherwise.
But why is this so important? Why have me and my co-founder Sashv (who is our incredible CTO at Creatorwood) and our team of 10+ folks from all over the world dedicated their life to this mission?
We all share one radical belief….
Storytellers Rule the World. And The Storytellers Who Rule the Future Will Be You.
Stories drive everything about the human experience. They bring us together and help us coordinate to achieve impossible things (like going to the moon) and they also tear us apart causing horrible atrocities.
Who holds the power?
The storytellers do.
And we were wrong all along when we thought our power ended at the page.
After all, our words are just the beginning. Our words create new worlds.
Once this realization hit me it changed everything about my life.
I realized how the current technology systems we have are designed to disempower storytellers. I felt this myself, my pursuit of trying to go viral on YouTube leading me to complete stunts that endangered my life. All of it to please an algorithm that could never love me back.
I got obsessed with the idea that if we that just built a new system… that put storytellers at the center and enabled everyone to become a storyteller, we could give people more power to create their own futures than ever before.
AI is the greatest opportunity we’ll ever have to claim power for creative people. AI is forcing us to rewrite the rules of our society. There’s one world in which life becomes more dystopian and disempowering for storytellers than ever.
But there’s another world, the world that I believe with every bone in my body is inevitable, where AI allows us to rewrite the rules of entertainment to give storytellers the power and control – and more opportunities for creative people to make a living.
BUT we have to build the platform that enables that.
Creatorwood was built for this future. A future we are rapidly moving toward today.
And it’s time I share with you what we are really building.
It’s so much more than just the Movie Machine. It’s a new industry for self-publishing films.
And 2026 will be the year this industry goes mainstream.
What We’re Launching at Creatorwood: A New Entertainment Industry – One Where Storytellers Rule
In addition to the launch of the Movie Machine out of beta in the coming months, we are launching the full Creatorwood platform. Here’s what’s in store…
The Creatorwood Streaming Platform: we’ll be launching on mobile app stores soon and eventually every single smart TV. On the platform anyone will be able to distribute their movies and shows. You keep 80% of the revenue, 100% of the rights to your content, AND all the emails of your followers and paying viewers. We are going all in on this, and the north star metric of our entire company is how much money we pay out to storytellers through the streaming platform. In the next few months, we expect to have the first income-generating AI movies and shows on the platform and will be rapidly scaling until we can pay out billions of dollars a year to you all and beyond.
The Creatorwood Exchange: the Movie Machine is pioneering the rise of one-person studios, where a single person using the Movie Machine can make a full-length film end to end. BUT because you can work alone doesn’t mean you should. We’ve been in beta for the last few months building out a system that allows anyone to hire AI filmmakers, editors, voice actors, and more to help them work on their film. AND anyone to become an AI filmmaker and get paid to make films for others. Thousands of people will be full-time AI filmmakers, getting paid to make films for others, in a near future. And shockingly, behind the scenes, we already have the first few full-time AI filmmakers getting paid to make movies for clients. In the Exchange, you can find the perfect AI filmmaker to help you bring to life and collaborate simply and efficiently all-in-one place. Learn how to post a production and work on a production in the Creatorwood Exchange HERE. We’re launching publicly in the coming months.
Product Placement: the story is just the beginning. When viewers watch your AI movies and shows, they are experiencing worlds they want to be more immersed in. That gown your heroine is wearing? Many of your viewers may want to buy it. We’re actively bringing brands into the Creatorwood ecosystem, creating a new income stream for storytellers where brands pay for product-placement in AI movies and shows. If you own or work for a brand interested in getting in on the ground floor of AI product-placement in films (an entirely new advertising format) reply to this email. Our team will get you set up with a special early bird deal.
Crowdfunding: we have multiple creators raising $100k+ in funds to make a series of productions using the Movie Machine. It’s remarkable and we are incredibly grateful for the support of folks already going all-in on building the next generation of film studios around the Movie Machine. With that said – funding should be open to everyone. It costs money to generate film with AI. It’s 1,000x more affordable than traditional filmmaking but can still costs thousands of dollars for a full-length film. How can we ensure that anyone with an idea people want to see can get access to funding, regardless of whether they have the funds to do so personally? We’re launching Crowdfunding on the Creatorwood Streaming Platform to bring that future to life – and we can’t wait.
Audiodramas: why stop at movies and shows? Long-run Creatorwood is aiming to be a new entertainment industry. Our first expansion in the coming months will be into audiodramas, which will be extremely cheap and easy for anyone to make, produce, and even distribute on Creatorwood.
As you can tell, we have been busy.
We’re swinging big, growing our team with the best people I’ve ever worked with, and going all-in on building this new industry.
Thanks to all of your support during our beta, you have proved to us that the time to build is now. The future where Storytellers Rule the World is today.
And you are all those storytellers 💚.
The Big Bet We Are Taking
The people at the center of the Creatorwood universe are storytellers. Whether you are a writer, an author, a screenwriter, or just someone with messy scribbled notes and a passion, the people at the center of our world are storytellers.
We believe anyone can be a storyteller – and are making it so simple and easy-to-use Creatorwood that anyone can bring their stories to life without technical know-how or even needing to have any experience filmmaking.
We’re building this new entertainment industry for all of you.
And couldn’t be more excited to be here.
Our priorities are simple:
Build the best technology as the infrastructure for this new industry (Movie Machine, Streaming Platform, etc.).
Bring viewers into this new ecosystem at scale – by marketing tons of movies and shows (super exciting results to be shared here in the coming months).
Go all-in on community, events, and education to help you tell better stories and become world class at owning an entertainment business that you control. For now, we have our Discord community, our YouTube channel with tons of amazing videos to help you in your AI filmmaking + storytelling journey, our free Creatorwood book, and some new events upcoming to help you write better stories in preparation for the public launch of the Movie Machine 😊.
I’ll be in touch with more soon.
Thank you everyone for being here.
And as always don’t forget…
Storytellers Rule the World,
Michael Evans and the Creatorwood Team
P.S. Seriously would love to hear your thoughts in response to this email. Team will be responding to every single one of you. I’m excited to see how we can collaborate and work together to build this future. All I can say is we are all in. Storytellers Rule the World. We won’t stop, until you’re one of them 👑.