Kavan the Kid: The Batman Film Warner Bros Took Down, and What He Built Instead

Gone on day five.

The first audience question was the one everyone asks about Kavan: what happened to the Batman film?

In December 2024 he made an AI Batman film with Mike J Mitch and Sav, who would go on to be his co-founders at Phantom X. It got a lot of press and became, at that point, the most-watched thing he had ever put on YouTube. On the fifth day he checked how it was doing.

“Wonder how it's doing. Gone. And then I go to all my other socials, gone.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 2:47

YouTube shows you who pulled a video. It was Warner Bros, and a cease and desist arrived in the post a few weeks later. He never tried to re-share it, and found out you can't anyway: once YouTube flags a file for copyright, that exact file won't upload again. Kavan says it was a big part of why Phantom X exists, a studio built around original IP.

He is honest about the film itself. Studio executives still bring it up fondly in meetings, but he thinks that is because nobody can watch it any more. Like a film you loved as a kid, it gets better in memory than it ever was.

Every job on the set.

Before AI, Kavan spent fifteen years in music videos and commercials, plus fine-art photography. In March 2020 he released a self-portrait photo book he had been hyping all through 2019. Its title was Stay Inside and Don't Let the Dreams Out. He did not mean to predict the pandemic. The book is full of masks and bandaged faces, the same visual language you see in The Chronicles of Bone.

In his early days working with Island and Atlantic Records he became known as the director a label could hand a $20,000 to $30,000 budget and get something that looked huge. To make any money on that, he hired almost nobody.

“I was the set designer, the set builder, I was the cinematographer, the director of photography, the editor. It was like super saiyan training.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 6:49

He went to film school, and says he learned more on those sets than in class. His advice for 2026 is blunt.

“Don't go to film school. It's a waste of time. Just go to the school of YouTube, and the library, and books on Amazon.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 7:49

The technical side of AI is a learning curve you can climb quickly, he says. What makes a filmmaker stand out is their own vision. That is why he rejects the idea that AI is just a rip-off machine.

“I've seen more original work through AI than I've seen come out of Hollywood. AI didn't kill Hollywood. Hollywood killed themselves when they started using analytical writing.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 8:58

One man, five seasons.

Andrew asked whether The Chronicles of Bone is a team effort. It isn't. Kavan does all the generation, editing and design himself, with Sav from Phantom X stepping in on VFX clean-up when a shot has something unfixable in it.

He wrote the series for six or seven months before he made a single shot, noodling on it during the Echo Hunter days. The spark was an announcement he should have been excited about.

“When they announced Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, I just had this sigh. I love him. But I knew what it was going to be: the same story we've seen a hundred times, just better shot.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 11:51

So he went to the public domain. King Arthur, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Captain Nemo: characters whose stories we have all seen too many times. His idea was to put them all in one made-up world, strip each of them down to the bones, and rebuild them his way. Once he started, the characters took over. The whole show is now written, five seasons of it.

The masks were the workaround.

▶ Watch Echo Hunter

Echo Hunter came out on 28 May 2025: a world where the elite harvest clones for spare parts, and a hunter starts to question his mission. On the weekly show, Chris and Andrew remembered it as the first AI film where the sound design made them gasp. Kavan built all of it by hand, because at the time AI video generated no audio at all, and composer Miguel Johnson wrote the score. Made with Arcana Labs, it was billed as the first SAG-AFTRA-approved AI film, with real actors including Gideon Burkhard from Inglourious Basterds.

“I believe sound is 90% of a film.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 21:56

It was his first original idea after the Batman and Star Wars fan films, and he says those fan films were deliberate. He didn't want to waste his own ideas before the tools could carry them. Echo Hunter was the first story he felt they could, for one specific reason: its characters never take their helmets off. In the story, if a hunter removes his mask his head explodes, so his memories can never come back. In production, it meant he barely had to show human faces or lip-sync, which tools like Runway Act-One couldn't do well yet.

Hollywood would never make it that way, he points out, because once you cast a star, they have to show their face. That is why superheroes always take their masks off.

Almost all of Echo Hunter started in Midjourney. There were no reference images then: every shot began as a first-frame image, prompted carefully enough that characters came out about 90% the same, then animated image-to-video, mostly in Kling 1.6. To lock the church location, his partner at the time suggested a big cross behind the villain, which kept shifting size between generations. His photography background saved it: he composited the images in Photoshop, exactly as he used to with his self-portraits.

Tinker Bell is a killer now.

▶ Watch The Chronicles of Bone, Chapter One: A Vengeful Fairy

Producer Paul's favourite episode, and the moment most viewers realise this is not the Peter Pan they grew up with. Peter is dead, Neverland has fallen, and Tink is out for revenge. Kavan calls her one of the most powerful characters in the whole universe. She can change her size like Ant-Man, which is how she ends up bursting out of a soldier's mouth.

Then he held up a mask to the camera. Many of the characters started as costumes he made or bought, photographed himself wearing, then pushed through Nano Banana iteration by iteration until they looked the part. He calls them the Temu versions.

The Collector, the fan favourite, began as CVS bandages wrapped around his face, a black hat, a yellow raincoat and black gloves. Several characters wear the same jacket in their base photos, recoloured. Captain Nemo's mask is a real mask down to the detail. Kavan found it on Etsy, made by an artist in Spain, and asked before using it.

“He ended up signing over the rights for me to use the mask, and be able to copyright it.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 40:38

Build the fanbase, then call the studio.

A viewer asked whether season five will look completely different from season one. Kavan hopes so. His goal is AI you can't tell apart from camera footage, and he expects every season to look dated next to the one after it.

“At the basis of everything, it's all about story.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 48:32

Then he laid out the business model, and it is an old one. Around 2009, musicians started making their own songs and videos and blowing up online, and labels stopped developing unknowns and signed the artists who already had tens of millions of views. Kavan thinks AI filmmakers are at the same point: build an IP with a die-hard fanbase first, then walk into the studio.

Andrew had seen that film before. He worked at MySpace from 2006 to 2009, with bands like the Arctic Monkeys building audiences slowly until the industry suddenly woke up.

“I've seen this story before. I know how it's going to end.”

Andrew Davis▶ 50:48

The release schedule is part of the plan: a new chapter on the first Tuesday of every month, eight episodes in season one and ten in every season after. The one he was making that week, Battle of the Bay, was the hardest thing he had ever made: hundreds of background characters fighting while the camera follows the leads.

Gravel is being dumped on you.

Kavan rarely talks about his personal life on social media. On the show he did: it had been a month of a family loss and a late night at the vet, with deadlines that didn't move. He shared it, he said, because it's easy to look at someone doing well online and assume their life is perfect.

“Some months are magic, and everything's coming up roses. And then there's some months where it's like gravel is being dumped on you. You still got to push through.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 54:39

It was also the source of the session's best story. Kavan uses ChatGPT, which he calls Gordy, to help write music prompts for Suno. He wanted a cue with the feel of Vegeta's Sacrifice from Dragon Ball Z, and Gordy refused on copyright grounds. An hour of arguing later, it finally conceded his point.

“Bro, they don't own the instrument. They don't have the instrument copyrighted.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 57:53

One line in a journal.

▶ Watch Last Recall (A Wonder Studios Original)

Last Recall, made for Wonder Studios, follows two federal agents a year after a catastrophe in the town of Harlow, Virginia, using experimental technology to relive the survivors' final memories. Paul asked whether Kavan writes with the YouTube algorithm in mind. He doesn't.

“I'm fully free of that thinking. I just write the story.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:07:30

The film opens on a scene so violent he expected YouTube to flag it. YouTube didn't. LinkedIn did, greying it out for violence. He kept the opening anyway, because the whole story depends on it.

The idea came from one handwritten line in an old-school journal: what if you could relive memories as if experiencing them for the first time? He first explored it in a Runway Gen 2 short called Memory Man, when things barely moved. Then he asked the follow-up question: if reliving memories became a legal drug like alcohol, how would the government use it? Police would make witnesses relive the worst moments of their lives to solve cases. That is the Recall Evidence Unit.

To come down after a dark day of work, he watches true crime, because the narrators help him sleep, and he was halfway through The Sopranos with The Wire next. Those early HBO shows are what made him want to tell long-form stories, and the bar he and the Phantom X artists aim for.

Fifty references and a regular man.

▶ Watch The Chronicles of Bone, Chapter Three: The Nightmare Below

Chapter Three takes us into Robin Hood's camp, where Jackal earns his place and learns that battles are won in the mind before the hands. Asked why everyone has a British accent, Kavan said it's where the characters come from. Captain Nemo's accent is Indian English for the same reason, and Nemo is finally unmasked in the next episode. He is already juggling more than 30 characters, and hopes to push episodes to 30 or 35 minutes by season two.

On grading, he works in DaVinci Resolve with a light touch: temperature, tint, contrast, shadows, highlights and a few colour pops. AI can fake the look of log footage but doesn't carry the colour data, and true log is on his wishlist.

Then he gave away his consistency workflow.

“Every gen I'm doing right now is maxed out on the reps. Knowing 2.5 is coming with 50 reps, I'm just like, I need it so bad.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:28:16

Sound has changed completely since Echo Hunter, which was built from his own effects library, Artlist and a lot of kit-bashing. Now Seedance generates most of the sound and he prompts for specific sounds the way he prompts for pictures. It isn't perfect. The day before, one of his characters kept screaming like a demon.

“I had to put in my prompt: he screams, he's a regular man.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:30:35

The only enemy is time.

The last question came from Danny in the chat: would he ever bring a team onto Chronicles of Bone? Not on the show itself, yet. He wants to commission artists for a who's-who book of the characters and the world map, and Phantom X works with teams on commercial projects and has deals with major studios he can't talk about. But the show comes from his heart, and he is particular about every choice, down to which generation makes the cut.

“I always say that the biggest enemy is time. That's the only enemy, the true enemy in my life.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:36:31

He had to take a call before the end. After he left, Chris and Andrew agreed he had been the most anticipated guest in the show's history, and the clearest case yet for self-publishing an original world and letting the audience prove it.