Name: The Call of the Wild
Released: 2020

Most of the loudest arguments for generative AI in filmmaking have come from technologists and start-up founders. This one carries a different signature. David Barron, the British producer whose credits run across six Harry Potter films, is attaching his name to an AI-generated adaptation of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and he is not selling it as a cheaper way to make a film that could be shot conventionally. He is selling it as the only way to make this one properly.

As Deadline first reported, the project is written and directed by Simon Rumley, the British filmmaker behind Red White & Blue and Crushed. The film will be generated at nmatic, with CGI and traditional visual effects brought in for the more complex scenes. Its producers are billing it as the first faithful adaptation of London’s novel, on the grounds that it will be built from the subjective experience of Buck, the dog at the centre of the story, rather than from the vantage point of the humans around him.

Barron frames the choice as a question of scale, not savings. “London’s canvass is so epic, the Alaskan geography so gruelling, the dog and wolf fights so visceral that a faithful cinematic adaptation has hitherto been logistically and financially impossible,” he said. “But technology has finally caught up with London’s vision, and we believe now is the time to do justice.”

That is the chess move worth watching. A producer from one of the biggest franchise machines British cinema has produced is arguing that a public-domain classic has been waiting for a tool rather than a budget. The pitch leans on literary fidelity, the one argument that studio versions of a beloved book can rarely claim, and uses it as the case for a production model that most of the industry still treats with suspicion.

The story itself is unchanged. Buck is a pampered St. Bernard, torn from his comfortable life in California’s Santa Clara Valley and sold into the brutal world of the Klondike Gold Rush, where he discovers the wild instinct that has always lurked inside him.

London published the novel in 1903, and it has reached the screen several times, most recently in the 2020 version directed by Chris Sanders, in which Harrison Ford starred alongside a computer-generated Buck. Barron produces the new version with Mark Sandell, whose credits include A Liar’s Autobiography, and Nick Price. No cast, release date or distribution plan was included in the announcement.

Behind the camera, in so far as there is one, the key credits read differently from a Klondike shoot. At nmatic, Chris Catchpole, Carl Lyttle and Toby White head up prompting and technical work, the department that now stands where the sled teams and the snowbound location crew would once have been listed.