“Can an LLM make a feature-length movie on its own?” by Josh Snider

How it did

Betteridge's Law of Headlines says the answer is no[1], but I was able to make a feature-length adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland.

I have a YouTube channel where I mostly get LLMs to write albums and make them into music videos. This naturally made me curious whether an LLM could make a feature-length movie on its own. It doesn't seem like it would be harder to do than to disprove the Jacobian conjecture[2] and if the challenge is to just work for a long time, it should be noted that METR's time-horizon benchmark is saturated.[3]

Even with my assistance, I would still say the result is a failure. It's good enough that I'm willing to put my name to it as the first feature-length movie I've made, but that is judging by the standards of small YouTube channels, not movies as an overall category.

Why I think it failed

I would not say agency is an obstacle for this work. Claude Fable 5 knew what to do and when I gave it permission it was perfectly capable of babysitting hours of video-generation runs, debugging API issues and [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) How it did

(01:00) Why I think it failed

(01:33) Timing issues

(02:22) Video is expensive

(03:03) Video generators are still pretty bad

(04:19) Coordination difficulties

(05:33) Forgetfulness and context rot

(06:19) Where we go from here

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 22nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.