Zack London already knows how to get people to watch his films for free. The filmmaker known online as Gossip Goblin says he has built an audience of about four million around a science-fiction universe of modified bodies, predatory corporations and humanity’s habit of engineering its own decline.

On Tuesday, London and Edward Saatchi, CEO of Fable, the film’s co-producer, released the first theatrical trailer for Gods Don’t Give Gifts , an R-rated anthology feature made using generative AI that opens on fewer than 1,000 U.S. screens on December 4, according to Fable. The trailer is expected to run before films in theaters in Los Angeles, New York and other cities starting this weekend.

Saatchi is submitting the film for consideration for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

“I built a story universe where transhumanism has arrived, the body is upgradable, memories are merchandise, and consciousness itself can be transferred from one body to another,” London wrote in a director’s statement for the film. “Then I asked the question: what do people actually do in it?”

His answer runs through all four stories. “People still want love, status, relief, pleasure, belonging, escape, transcendence,” he wrote. “But the more powerful the tools become, the further those cravings drift from the limits that once gave them shape.”

The more immediate test is commercial. London has spent years turning strange short-form films into millions of views online. Now he and Fable have to find out whether some of those viewers will buy a ticket.

London and Saatchi discussed that test with me in a joint video interview; Saatchi followed up by email and text.

Saatchi thinks the outcome may depend on how audiences classify the film. “If people think of this like a normal movie, then it should actually do quite well,” he says. If they treat it as an AI experiment, he expects many to wait and watch it on YouTube.

Reach is something Gossip Goblin already has. Conversion is the part nobody has proved.

Saatchi’s target is millions of trailer views, which he says would put the film well above most releases. A result on that scale would show fans and an industry watching closely that London’s online following can travel with him into theaters.

How Gossip Goblin Is Marketing A Film Made With AI

The trailer is the conventional part of the campaign. Around it, London is treating the universe itself as the marketing system. That works because the world was built in unusual detail: his team designed it, he wrote, “down to its coffee mugs, alleyway signage, and crab-juice-can labels.”

His team has been releasing what he calls “lore teasers,” three-minute stories built from the film’s premise that use none of its footage. A small team can produce material fast enough to keep testing ways of reaching people, London says, rather than relying mainly on heavy advertising spending, although the campaign will include some.

For weeks before the trailer, London has been posting fragments of that lore, including A Happy Ending , across Discord, Instagram and TikTok. On his Discord, fans pick the pieces apart and trade theories about what they reveal.

NiiroCore Broadcasting takes the idea further. Named for the corporation that governs the film’s world, the in-world television network includes the dating-show parody Lovers’ Lagoon , Dog Judge and Prawn Stars , whose stars are giant augmented shrimp. London says the shows can reach viewers for whom dark science fiction is not a natural entry point.

The most tangible example is a pair of sneakers. Fctry Lab, a Los Angeles sneaker studio, produced prototypes, and London’s team put them on the film’s protagonists. A limited run is now being made for giveaways and as an early test of how far the fiction can extend into physical goods.

The shoes entered the fiction as prototypes. They are coming back out as a product.

Turning Gossip Goblin Fans Into Participants

The campaign also hands part of the world to the audience. Fable is running a fan-film competition with a $15,000 prize. It will stay open while the film is in theaters, Saatchi said in an email, and Fable plans to release many of the entries as the opening approaches.

Saatchi imagines films eventually launching alongside an AI model, letting fans generate their own scenes and episodes. In his version of that model, the original rights holder would own the derivative material.

For this release, the experiment is smaller: turn spectators into participants, then see whether participation deepens their relationship with the world.

London expects more resistance from the general public than from the industry, particularly in the U.S. Yet he says 60% of his audience lives outside the country, a figure that has not been independently verified. Fable is opening in the U.S. first, Saatchi said, while also talking to U.K. cinemas.

London also resists the label most often attached to his work. “I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s an AI movie,” he says, pointing to the human writers, voice actors, musicians and Foley artists behind the production.

He does not hide the tools either. “I made these films with AI, which some people find ironic. But using a medium to interrogate that medium is one of the oldest moves in art,” he wrote in the statement. AI, he wrote, allowed him to put stories onscreen without the committees and constraints of conventional production.

The Water Lord , one of the lore drops, shows what that looks like. A parched townsman begs a lord to stop his “thinking machine” from drinking the town’s water. The lord is unmoved. “Just this morning, it produced eleven million lifelike images of cats,” he boasts. “Each picture it crafts is equivalent to one peasant’s H2O intake.”

His remedy for the shortage: “The solution is fewer of you.”

The joke lands on the machine’s owners, not its critics. In an interview, London says the water argument against AI has been blown out of proportion. His lore still gives that argument one of its most memorable forms.

Can Online Fans Become Moviegoers?

None of these experiments pays off commercially if the audience stays on the platforms where London found it.

That is why the release also looks surprisingly conventional: lobby posters in theaters, a Los Angeles billboard campaign from November, advance screenings for critics and screenings for Academy voters.

The rollout itself borrows from YouTube. Fable said it follows a distribution strategy inspired by Iron Lung , the independent horror film from Mark Fischbach, the YouTuber known as Markiplier. Saatchi is careful not to promise blockbuster numbers.

Fable is not relying entirely on fans to open theater doors. Iron Lung , Obsession and Backrooms have already helped persuade exhibitors that YouTube filmmakers with large followings can bring audiences, Saatchi said in an email.

Now the fans are being asked to fill the seats. Promoted on Instagram, the Gossip Goblin Ambassador Program invites devoted followers to “help cultivate new Goblins in places our algorithms cannot reach” and to “trick, cajole, and otherwise summon audiences” for the release. Rewards include artifacts, access to screenings and the chance to inspire a character in London’s universe.

A trailer with millions of views would show that Gossip Goblin can still command attention online. The harder evidence arrives December 4, when some of those viewers are asked to leave the feed and pay for a seat.