Xavier Collins
About ninety percent of scripts never get made. Xavier Collins got into the reasons why on the Day One FM / Diaspora podcast, and how AI is rewriting the economic journey from script to screen.
The structural problem with film finance
The traditional film financing model works roughly like this: an independent producer carves out geographic territories and pre-sells the distribution rights to fund the production budget.
A film that costs $20 million to make gets financed by selling the New Zealand rights here, the French rights there, each territory contributing a piece before a single frame is shot. Xavier saw this firsthand through Lumiere Ventures, his film rights business.
The problem is that this system generates enormous waste.
Films routinely go over budget. Talented filmmakers with strong scripts can't raise the finance to get them made. And the ones that do get made often commit hundreds of thousands before anyone knows whether the creative direction is working.
The industry is under pressure to produce more with less on faster timescales, but nobody wants to strip out the artisanal craft that makes the work worth watching. Xavier argues that AI solves this by unlocking projects that the current economics won't support.
Unlocking previously unviable projects
Let's take pre-visualisation as one example. A filmmaker can storyboard a concept, map out what a scene could look like, and test creative directions, all before committing production budget.
A documentary reconstruction where no archival footage exists. A teaser that persuades a production company to greenlight the full project. A horror sequence that would have cost more in traditional VFX than the entire film's budget. The technology makes things possible that previously weren't.
The gold rush and the jewelers
There's an AI gold rush happening right now. OpenAI, DeepMind, and the rest are extracting the gold. NVIDIA is selling the picks and shovels.
Wonder, in Xavier's words, is the jeweller; the artisan who takes the raw material and crafts it into something people actually want to consume.
You don't make fine jewellery with gold alone. You blend materials together. Wonder's approach to original films and agency work follows this same logic: AI tools mixed with traditional creative craft. The company is tool-agnostic, working with whichever models produce the best results at any given moment.
Xavier called it "Internet 2.0."
When the internet arrived, restaurants didn't all get websites overnight. The adoption curve stretched over years. AI is at that same early stage, with only a handful of people using the tools anywhere near their potential. Staying across rapidly changing models, knowing which tools to combine and how - that is itself a competitive advantage. A moat built on skill rather than access.
How Xav views entertainment through a marketplace lens
Xavier's marketplace career shaped how he thinks about Wonder's community.
At Deliveroo, he joined as one of the first 30 people, carried backpacks to restaurants, and scaled to managing thousands of riders.
At Turo, he invested in professional photography for listings and personally coached the first hosts.
Both taught him the same thing: quality supply drives everything. Getting to a hundred cars in search or twenty restaurants on the platform is a vanity metric if the supply isn't good. Understanding what quality looks like from the customer's perspective is crucial. If a marketplace business can solve this, they'll usually find product-market fit.
He applies the same thinking to Wonder's community. That community of creators from old-school filmmaking backgrounds and new-school AI backgrounds is Wonder's quality supply.
If the best filmmakers and artists are already in your ecosystem, the work gets better. The best people make the ecosystem stronger, and the stronger ecosystem attracts better people.
The Wonder Studios model
Get the best creators in one place, give them tools that change what's economically possible, and projects would have previously died on the page start making their way to the screen.
Ninety percent of scripts never get made. Here at Wonder, we're betting that we can change that stat.
If you want to work with the studio, get in touch. If you're a creator, our community is open.
