An Interview with Hooroo Jackson (“My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?”) – 12/5/25
‘My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?’ Interview with Mike Haberfelner, December 2025
Your new movie My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?—in a few words, what’s it about?
My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? is a romantic superhero comedy built around secretary Abigail Winters and billionaire Mark Waters. It is glossy, playful, and character-led. It exists as two complete feature editions with two different Abigails, so the audience can choose which protagonist performance to follow. It is the first fully AI CG-animated feature film in cinema history, introducing cinema’s first explicit choose-your-protagonist feature concept, and is the first feature to employ agentic AI editing as part of its editorial workflow.
With My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? being a superhero movie, is that a genre especially dear to you, and some of your genre favourites?
It is built off my running desire to have films operate psychically, meaning you can close your eyes and still enjoy the film. It’s tethered only to your imagination. Its influences are: The Incredibles (the tonal balance), Tim Burton’s Batman and the Batman Animated Series (the gothic office-world absurdity) and Iron Man (the hard technology). For the romance and elegance, Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief was a major reference point, along with ’80s city-girl rom-com energy. As loveable as Abigail is in the final film, she began as a harder-edged city girl at the start, placing her in this whole Sean Young, Melanie Griffith, Michelle Pfeiffer camp.
After the heavy artistic drama of A Very Long Carriage Ride, I wanted this one to be light and enjoyable to direct, away from taverns and carriages; this one lives in this whole corporate city aesthetic which was refreshing to operate within. The film began as a billionaire romance novel, and Abigail evolved from sharper “edgy city girl” to something more lovable and buoyant.
(Other) sources of inspiration when writing My Boyfriend is a Superhero!??
I write with LLMs like a writers’ room and like actor improv: I prompt, audition options, rewrite and lock what works. Multiple models act as sparring partners and judges, but the final authorship is mine; selection, structure, taste and revision. If someone says “AI wrote it,” I translate that as: the script came through a machine-collaboration process. But it wasn’t pulled verbatim, every scene is directed, shaped, and locked by me.
As with your last few movies, My Boyfriend is a Superhero!?’s visuals and soundtrack were entirely AI-generated—so as a director, how much creative control do you have over the material, over the look and feel of your movie?
The misconception is that AI reduces creative control. In practice, I have more control than I ever had in traditional production, because iteration is fast, and I can drive performance, framing, rhythm, and tone directly through repeated passes.
The difference is that the department heads are machine collaborators: they propose options instantly, and I direct by selecting, revising, and locking decisions in the cut. It’s still filmmaking, just with a different kind of crew.
That is the total cost saving between AI and tradfilm is 10,000x. That is so vast, it might as well be the difference between 0 and 1. It is post-scarcity being realized. I do not think there is a resolution to sound logical when describing the reality of AI. You have to surrender that you are realizing the incomprehensible.
Having worked with AI for quite a few years now, how has the technology developed when it comes to filmmaking? And did you still experience significant changes for you as a filmmaker between your last one, A Very Long Carriage Ride, and My Boyfriend is a Superhero!??
The tools improved fast, especially in character consistency, motion, and scene continuity, and I’m getting those gains without the production budgets traditional animation requires.
Six months earlier, A Very Long Carriage Ride tested the idea that a feature can exist as two valid editions released simultaneously. With My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? I pushed that logic further into performance and authorship: it’s a fully AI 3D-animated feature built to play as mainstream entertainment.
I call it AI cinema’s Toy Story in a practical sense: a first-of-its-kind moment where a new production model proves it can carry a full feature. It’s still an ultra-low budget, one-person film, so you’ll find a few artifacts, but I treat some of that as part of an editorial philosophy I call the True Line Cut, where decisions get locked and carried forward rather than endlessly polished.
In terms of budget, My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? is at $1,000 versus Toy Story‘s $30 million, that is not 10,000x, that is 30,000x, even before marketing. But one thing on Toy Story I do hold My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? with, it’s right there in its entertainment. How it accomplishes this is primarily through its shorthand in casting. This central relationship between Abigail Winters and Mark Waters is pitch-perfect. The comic relief with Reejus (played by Rogers, the first machine movie star). It’s the actors who carry this film. How great is Abigail’s performance? Her voice is my luckiest find in casting, she carries this entire blockbuster on her shoulders.
My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? has a “choose your protagonist” option to it—care to explain?
The “choose your protagonist” idea came late in pre-production and became the film’s most radical feature. The movie exists as two complete editions, built around two different instantiations of Abigail, and the audience can choose which version to watch.
Technically, it wasn’t a simple filter. I replaced the lead shot-by-shot across the entire film, one section at a time. Like with A Very Long Carriage Ride, I also have extensive screen recordings of the process, so it’s auditable as a real production method.
What surprised me is that it isn’t a soulless swap. The two Abigails produce two distinct performances and two distinct tonal experiences, audiences can compare, argue, and rewatch. In the second version, Abigail carries a strong African accent, which I chose deliberately to put a kind of voice and presence in a mainstream film that I have never seen centered. The main shoot began on September 1st and premiered November 23rd. The second Abigail premiered on December 6th.
The $64-question of course, where can My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? be seen?
It is currently in streaming and rolling out everywhere. Both versions are currently available on Escape.AI, the first video platform exclusively for AI filmmakers, which is nice to be a part of in such a hostile climate.
Anything you can tell us about audience and critical reception of My Boyfriend is a Superhero!??
The film is still early in its release cycle and finding its audience through streaming and curated platforms. Reception around AI cinema is polarized in the 2020s, but my approach is to build work that survives the moment with complete editions, full documentation, and stable archival materials so the films can be revisited and judged on their own terms. My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? is the most technically advanced AI feature film yet made, so I am eager for people to see it.
Any future projects you’d like to share?
I’ve now released five AI features: Window Seat, DreadClub, A Very Long Carriage Ride, My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? and The New Machine Cinema documentary. Next is Strings, my push toward a strictly photoreal AI feature, with performances that hold up. I’m taking my time because the goal is to make the best possible film.
Your/your movie’s website, social media, whatever else?
HoorooJackson.com and Instagram.
Anything else you’re dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask?
The True Line Cut brings forth that in post-scarcity, the best resource we have is scarcity. Therefore films must be made adhering to scarcity principles even in post-scarcity. The solution is in jazz. Whatever you place down becomes fixed in the final work; The True Line Cut is where film is made in one single pass without revision. My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? has a separate true line cut of the feature. The concept furthers in the New Machine Cinema documentary, whose visuals were all placed down in one single pass; when they glitch out or when the visuals overwhelm the technology, I attempt to recontextualize it on screen, so the journey of every single shot remains etched in living motion.
Thanks for the interview!
