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Still of ‘The House’ (provided by CJ ENM)

A total production budget of KRW 500 million (approx. USD 360,000). Principal photography completed in just four days. CJ ENM has produced a feature-length film using a hybrid approach that combines artificial intelligence with live-action footage. The occult thriller The House launched on Korea's homegrown OTT platform TVING on May 1. Actors performed against green screens in live-action shoots, while all backgrounds and visual effects were generated by AI. The project marks the first time a major Korean content company has fully integrated AI into an actual production pipeline -- not as an experiment, but as a working methodology.

The House is a Korean occult thriller following Yumi, a young woman who can see the spirits of the dead, as she encounters a series of eerie and unsettling events after moving into a new apartment. In this 60-minute feature, all human performances were captured with real actors, while every visual element -- the apartment itself, creatures, and surrounding environments -- was generated using Google AI solutions. The production pipeline integrated three of Google's tools: Imagen for image generation, Nano Banana for image refinement and optimization, and Veo for video generation. Google Cloud applied its "Detect and Foundation" methodology, which precisely analyzes elements such as backgrounds, objects, lighting, and composition to ensure that creative intent is accurately reflected in AI-generated output.

Jung Chang-ik, Head of CJ ENM's AI Studio team, described the approach: "We filmed actors' performances in a green screen environment and used AI to generate all backgrounds and visual effects, expanding the production paradigm. By shooting every scene indoors without location moves, we improved efficiency and gave both cast and crew a creative experience unlike anything before." Actor Kim Sin-yong, who plays a security guard in the film, noted that the experience differed from standard chroma key shoots: "Instead of imagining the effects during filming, I could actually see the AI backgrounds and effects on set in real time, which made it much easier to stay immersed."

The project also involved co-production studios Deohan Film and Saltmakers, both members of the AI Contents Alliance -- an industry-academia collaborative body launched in February 2026. The film serves as a practical demonstration of a new ecosystem model in which tech companies, content studios, and production houses work in close collaboration.

The numbers The House puts forward carry significant weight for the industry. Baek Hyun-jeong, Head of Content Innovation at CJ ENM, stated that the project achieved cost savings of five to seven times compared to conventional production. Jung similarly noted that a standard production would have required at minimum five times the budget. The efficiency gains are expected to grow even further for genre films demanding large-scale visual effects -- disaster films, creature features, and action spectacles among them.

Limitations were openly acknowledged as well. Fully translating the nuance of actors' performances onto the AI-rendered screen remains a technical challenge, and the rapid pace of change in underlying AI tools was cited as a complicating factor on the production side. These reflect an honest assessment that the hybrid model is still finding its balance between efficiency and expressive fidelity.

In a broader global context, this project occupies a notable position. While much of the international discourse around AI in filmmaking has centered on labor displacement and copyright disputes, CJ ENM's approach centers the actor and preserves live performance -- using AI to expand the production's visual scope rather than replace human creativity. Baek signaled that the boundary between conventional and AI-produced films will eventually disappear, and that CJ ENM is moving to embed AI across the full content value chain: development, production, distribution, marketing, and advertising. As the global content industry continues to grapple with how -- and whether -- to integrate AI into creative production, The House stands as one of the first completed, publicly released feature films to test that question at scale. 

Sources

• CJ ENM Newsroom, "CJ ENM AI Hybrid Film The House World Premiere", 2026.04.30
• Kookmin Ilbo, "Only the Actors Are Real -- Everything Else Is AI: CJ ENM's KRW 500 Million Film", 2026.04.30

• Segye Ilbo, "AI Efficiency Is High but Can't Match Actors' Expressiveness", 2026.04.30