Max Einhorn and Tejas Shah, who formed Gennie together with Chelsea Durgin to pioneer the use of AI in factual content—with the microdrama gold rush next on their horizon—talk to ScreenMDM about using technology and data to expand the frontiers of storytelling.
Killer Kings, which aired on Sky HISTORY last summer, was the first documentary series to air with fully AI-generated recreations. FirstLookTV partnered with Gennie to bring historical figures like Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, and Emperor Gaius to life. More recently, the company worked with Phoenix Television in the U.K. on Birds Aren’t Real, a series about modern conspiracy theories, which was first pitched at BossaNova’s Development Days.
“You want to convey what your vision is for a show without spending too much money trying to demonstrate what that show is,” Einhorn, CEO, says of the plight of an indie producer looking to get a project off the ground. Einhorn says the team jumped at the opportunity to work with Phoenix on the doc “because it demonstrates not just what AI can do from a cost-savings perspective, but also from a creative perspective. Since the show is based on conspiracy theories, it’s about people buying into things that don’t have much basis in reality. We depict news broadcasters and social media creators exclaiming, ‘News just broke that birds truly are not real!’ We are able to visualize what people are buying into, even though there’s no video for that. And in a way, the project in itself is kind of an inadvertent commentary on where we’re going with the age of misinformation and what role AI video plays in the world, because you always used to believe that video depicts the truth. Now that’s not necessarily the truth.”
Gennie’s founders all previously worked at FilmRise, the New York-based streaming and distribution company now under the Radial Entertainment banner that developed one of the largest independent content libraries in the streaming space.
“At FilmRise, we saw what genres worked,” says Shah, chief business officer at Gennie. “True crime and history were the most evergreen. What we knew from producing that type of content was that the reenactments were the most cost-intensive, time-intensive, and also the least liked parts of those shows. And yet those shows still performed. We saw in Gen AI a way to improve upon a traditional process and be cost-effective.”
The company’s list of credits also includes Deep Blue CSI, in partnership with Woodcut Media, with “half a dozen other co-productions that we haven’t announced yet,” Einhorn says. “We’ve partnered with reputable production companies that are subject matter experts in certain genres, have good credibility with the buyers, but are itching to make shows they’ve never been able to make before.”
Its projects to date have all been in the factual space, but “genre expansion is very important to us,” Shah says, including the booming microdrama frontier. “We’re in the process of building out an automated workflow that shoots out the video as soon as you have a script in there,” Shah explains. “The key to microdramas is monetization. All these platforms are sprouting up. User acquisition is very expensive. It’s like the old days of streaming. They’re spending a lot on TikTok and Meta to advertise. They give them free tokens to watch the content. And as soon as those tokens are gone, [viewers] move to the next one. That churn is a replica of where AVOD and streaming were in 2019/2020. We’re trying to solve for the monetization factor. How do we get a sticky platform and how do we not spend so much money on user acquisition?”
Gennie is actively seeking production partners in the microdrama space—companies with strong narrative instincts and an understanding of how the format engages its audience—with the ambition of providing the production infrastructure and distribution intelligence to match.
Looking further ahead, Gennie’s genre roadmap reflects both the scale of its ambitions and the granularity of its data advantage. The founders’ experience at FilmRise means they know what kinds of content work and where there are opportunities to fill gaps in the market; creature features, sci-fi, paranormal content, faith-based programming, and catering to African American audiences are all areas of potential growth, Shah says.
