Choose Your Protagonist: My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?
Announcing Jackson’s upcoming fully AI 3D animated romcom, My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?
Expanding on “A Very Long Carriage Ride,” the groundbreaking proof of multifold machine cinema, ’My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?’ is the first film in the history of cinema where the audiences chooses the protagonist.
There’s a moment, right before the lights go down, when cinema can either hand you a seat or hand you the wheel. My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? chooses the latter.
It is the natural follow-through to Hooroo Jackson’s A Very Long Carriage Ride’s which premiered April ’25. Jackson called it, “One Film, Two Ways”, the first film in cinema history released in two different artistic styles simultaneously: stop motion and classic animation at once.
Where Carriage Ride proved that fledgling AI tools could lend to entirely new cinematic grammar, Superhero!? puts agency in the audience’s hands down to the character they see on screen.
At the title card you make a decision: Abigail A or Abigail B. Same character, same dialogue, same blocking, two Abigails: one white, one black.
No UI fireworks, no mid-film toggling.
A simple switch at the start, to establish the most basic proof of the first Choose-Your-Protagonist Feature Film.
This is the foundation on which future works can fan outward into many protagonists and many paths. For now: one clean, consequential choice as you enter the story.
My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? will also land as the first fully AI 3D CGI feature film. Others have explored AI in hybrid CGI pipelines, but Superhero!? is end-to-end, completely AI: sound, music, animation, performance, mise-en-scène, camera, and finish. Groundbreaking in the field of AI editing, the film also utilizes AI agents in the editing of the film.
But why two Abigails? Because the question has been simmering at the edge of culture and commerce. Jackson was fascinated by the swirl around a “Black Little Mermaid” and how a single casting decision could become a proxy for identity, tradition, marketing, and belonging.
He wondered: could cinema bridge wildly diverging expectations without flattening anyone? Can inclusion breathe rather than divide us?
And he carried an adjacent doubt born from videogames: if a “character select” changes the avatar but not the role—if nothing else shifts—does that become unintentionally insulting to the identity of the character?
This film refuses an easy answer, instead, the concept is built to ask these questions. In My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?, the two Abigails speak the same lines, hit the same marks, love the same boyfriend (the superhero), and inhabit the same plot.
Yet the felt experience shifts. Power dynamics waft through the room at different frequencies.
The boardroom reads colder or warmer. A flirtation lands playful or perilous. Abigail A seems to belong in the world effortlessly, while Abigail B always seems to be an outsider in the largely heteronormative setting.
The film shows—not tells—how context is a force of its own.
The result has been unexpectedly profound in rehearsal and direction. Scenes “identical” on paper are not identical to the body, to the history carried in a face, to the social oxygen filling a room. A joke lands with the same timing but tickles different nerves.
An interruption from a security guard has the identical words but not the identical weight.
Also returning are machine actors Rogers and Joan—whom Jackson dubs the first machine movie stars—both have now starred in three of Jackson’s AI features. Their presence ties Superhero!? back to the growing “machine repertory company” perfected in A Very Long Carriage Ride, a Dickensian ensemble with over 60 speaking parts, all machine actors, lending continuity to the larger New Machine Cinema.
This is Jackson’s fourth historic AI feature film, proven alongside his conceptual essays in AI film theory, such as “One Person, One Film,” “Speed of the Mind,” “The Living, Breathing Cinema.” Window Seat (’23, the first fully AI feature film in history), and DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict (’24, the first AI animated feature film in history.)
Most recently, he coined the terms the Adaptive Cinema Engine and True Line Cinema.
The road ahead is wide. Later works can add more options, drift perspectives mid-scene, or let the Story Brain adapt score, sound design, and secondary blocking to refract class, gender, and power with finer granularity. It starts with one single keystone. One Film, Two Ways, has become One Film, Five Ways*, has become Choose Your Protagonist.
- The first Choose-Your-Protagonist feature film — a.k.a. the first audience-selected protagonist feature in the history of cinema.
- The first fully AI 3D CGI feature film, in contrast to existing hybrid AI/traditional features.
- A production that utilizes AI editorial agents to sustain parity across versions—an early, practical deployment of the Adaptive Cinema Engine (Story Brain).
- The five versions include: Abigail A, Abigail B, Jazz soundtrack, synth soundtrack, and the True Line Cut.
My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? premieres later this fall/early winter.
