Roger Avary is directing Paradise Lost for Ex Machina Studios using AI to finally make Milton’s epic filmable. Here’s why this one might actually get made.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been defeating filmmakers for decades. That streak may be over.
The problem was never ambition. The problem was scale. A cosmic war in heaven, the creation of the world, the fall of man, Satan as a charismatic rebel archangel — the source material runs 10,000 lines of blank verse and spans dimensions that no practical production budget has been able to contain. A high-profile attempt from director Alex Proyas at Warner Bros., with Bradley Cooper attached to star, collapsed before it reached production.
The poem wasn’t unfilmable because nobody wanted to film it. It was unfilmable because the math never worked.
Ex Machina Studios believes AI changes the math.
The Bet Ex Machina Is Making
The California-based production company describes its proprietary AI as a tool that allows “expansive worlds to be realized at a responsible budget while preserving the primacy of real actors, human-authored narratives, and guild-aligned production practices.” That last clause is doing significant work — in a moment when AI’s role in film production is one of the industry’s most contested questions, Ex Machina is explicitly positioning itself on the side of human craft.
The AI handles scale. The humans handle everything else.
K5 International is launching world sales at the Cannes Market. Cast and start dates have not been set, though the project is described as carrying an ambitious budget for an independent production — which suggests Ex Machina isn’t treating this as a proof of concept. They’re treating it as a film.
Then There’s the Director
Roger Avary co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for that film in 1995. He is not a filmmaker who needs AI to compensate for lack of craft — which is precisely what makes him the right person to test whether AI can compensate for lack of budget.
Avary has been here before with difficult source material. He co-scripted Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 Beowulf for Paramount — another epic poem, another attempt to find the cinematic grammar for something that resists it. That experience is directly relevant here.
“Beowulf was a revisionist reimagining made on a massive budget,”
Avary explained
“but with Paradise Lost I’m taking a more faithful approach at a fraction of the cost, using cutting-edge generative AI to bring Milton’s vision to life in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.”
More faithful. At a fraction of the cost. That combination has never been available to a Paradise Lost adaptation before.
Why the Source Material Matters
Milton’s 1667 poem has influenced nearly everything. Mary Shelley, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Ridley Scott, Joseph Haydn, and Eminem have all drawn from it — a list that spans literary fiction, fantasy, visual effects cinema, classical composition, and hip-hop, which is either a testament to the poem’s range or a sign that everyone who encounters it feels compelled to do something with it and almost nobody finishes.
The producers frame it as “the ultimate faith-based heroic saga” — a cosmic war where Lucifer defies God, falls into Hell, and rises as Satan to trigger the fall of man. At its center is a question Avary clearly finds worth answering: “When faced with reckoning and crisis, do we obey, rebel, or redeem?”
That question is why this poem has survived 350 years. It’s also why no film version has managed to contain it.
Ex Machina and Avary are the next attempt. For the first time, the tools might be equal to the task.
Mini FAQ
What is the Paradise Lost film and who is directing it? Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Roger Avary is adapting John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost for Ex Machina Studios. The project uses AI production technology to realize the film’s cosmic scale at an independent budget. K5 International is handling world sales at the Cannes Market.
How is AI being used in the Paradise Lost film? Ex Machina Studios uses proprietary AI to build expansive visual worlds at a responsible budget while keeping real actors, human-authored scripts, and guild-aligned production practices at the center of the process.
Has Paradise Lost been attempted as a film before? Yes. Director Alex Proyas developed a version at Warner Bros. with Bradley Cooper attached, but the project did not reach production. Several other adaptations have been attempted over the decades without success, largely due to the scope and scale of the source material.
