David Barron, a producer on six Harry Potter films, is backing an AI-generated film of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, written and directed by British filmmaker Simon Rumley, first reported by Deadline. Rumley's earlier films include Red White & Blue and Crushed. As the report observes, most public cheerleading for AI filmmaking has come from technologists, which makes a producer from a major franchise an unusual advocate.
It will be generated at the AI studio nmatic, with CGI and conventional effects for the hardest scenes. The producers bill it as the first faithful version because it is told through the experience of Buck, the dog, rather than the humans around him.
Barron argues the book's scale, terrain and animal fights made a faithful film logistically and financially impossible until now, and that the technology has finally caught up with the book. He produces with Mark Sandell and Nick Price; no cast, date or distributor was announced, and nmatic's Chris Catchpole, Carl Lyttle and Toby White lead prompting and technical work, roles the report says replace the location crews such a shoot once needed.
London's 1903 novel was last filmed in 2020, with Harrison Ford and a computer-generated Buck. The story follows a pampered dog taken from California and sold into the Klondike Gold Rush, where he finds his wild nature.
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