The revenge thriller has arguably become one of streaming’s most reliable currencies. Ever since John Wick turned a dead dog into a billion-dollar franchise, nearly every platform has chased some variation of that mix of stylized vengeance and criminal-underworld mythology, and the trend has increasingly gone global. Korea has delivered with titles like Vincenzo, India has developed its own versions of the formula, and Turkey — perhaps one of the most underappreciated drama exporters in the market — has built a formidable industry around brooding antiheroes settling scores in Istanbul’s back streets. Turkish dizi series have often traveled remarkably well in Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia, which may help explain why major streamers have spent the last several years treating Turkish producers less as regional curiosities and more as franchise partners.

The latest move in that direction could prove especially notable, though perhaps not entirely for the reasons revenge-thriller fans might expect: Prime Video has acquired global rights to Çukur: Vartolu, a spin-off film from the hugely popular Turkish crime saga Çukur, and it is reportedly being made almost entirely with artificial intelligence (via​​​​​​Variety). Çukur, which traveled internationally as The Pit, was a phenomenon during its 2017 to 2021 run on Turkey’s Show TV. The series followed the Koçovalı family’s rule over a lawless Istanbul neighborhood, mixing family-dynasty drama with brutal street warfare in a way that earned it the shorthand comparisons to The Godfather, and it reportedly racked up around 6.4 billion views across platforms while selling to dozens of territories.

Vartolu Sadettin, the darkly funny gangster played by Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, started as an antagonist and became arguably the show’s breakout character. Building a spinoff around him is exactly what you’d do with this franchise. The film comes from Ay Yapim, the Istanbul powerhouse behind Çukur, through its Singapore-based AI studio AI Yapim, which made waves in August with Castle Walls, an AI-generated historical drama touted as the first show made end-to-end with AI to land on a major global streamer.

That project was a modest proof of concept at two 15-minute episodes. With the Vartolu movie, the company says it is taking its AI-native pipeline “from an original story to an established drama franchise,” which is a meaningfully bigger swing. Reviving a beloved character through synthetic imagery rather than bringing back the actor who made him iconic raises questions the Castle Walls experiment never had to answer, including how audiences who spent four seasons with Köstendil’s performance will respond to an algorithmic approximation of it, and what the arrangement means for the performer whose likeness presumably anchors the whole enterprise.

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