Remember that surreal AI music video of a Trump-branded beach resort in Gaza, complete with golden statues and shirtless cocktails with Elon Musk? That wasn’t just satire—it was a test run. The video, created by filmmakers Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen using Los Angeles-based Arcana Labs’ proprietary tools, was meant as a provocative experiment. Instead, it became viral political propaganda after being shared—without attribution—by Donald Trump on Truth Social.

Now, Arcana Labs is stepping into the spotlight. The company has raised $5.5 million in funding led by SEMCAP AI and officially launched Arcana AI, a full-stack production suite built to generate images, video, motion design, and visual effects with nothing more than a prompt. Co-founded by Millennium Media President Jonathan Yunger, Arcana brings together a team of engineers and Hollywood insiders with a clear goal: make AI a tool for filmmakers, not a threat.

The company’s platform offers model interoperability between its own engine and popular systems like DALL·E, Flux, and Stable Diffusion. Users can create, train, and deploy proprietary visual styles and motion models using tools from partners like Runway, Minimax, Kling, and Luma. Yunger calls it a “production company in a box,” and early use cases include a full-length AI-generated sci-fi epic and what the company says will be the first entirely AI-generated horror film.

But the Trump-Gaza clip—satirical or not—has already put Arcana’s name in the middle of the conversation around AI, ethics, and authorship in Hollywood. The video’s liftoff revealed how fast generative content can escape its original context, and how ill-equipped public platforms are to handle attribution and nuance.

“We’re constantly tuning for realism,” Yunger said in a separate interview, “but like any technology, these tools can be used in ways we never intended. Our goal is to empower artists, not to fuel misinformation.”

Even with the backlash, Arcana is accelerating. The company is building out Arcana Productions, a creative service arm for studios, brands, and agencies, as well as Arcana Academy, an education initiative to train the next generation of AI-native creators. Investors are bullish. One SEMCAP executive credited Arcana with cutting content production timelines from 300 iterations down to a few simple prompts.

With rising production costs, tightening studio budgets, and a surge of experimental workflows across the industry, Arcana represents a new kind of Hollywood disruptor. Whether it becomes the next generative content powerhouse—or a cautionary tale—may depend less on the tech, and more on who’s holding the prompt.