Conn Iggulden’s Genghis Tests AI Book-To-Screen Adaptations

When The Author Has The Last Word

Final cut, the right to approve the version that is released, usually stays with the studio. Novelists who sell screen rights typically give up any say in the finished work. “I know of a lot of authors who sort of come out of the film of their book going, ‘Well, I don’t know what that was. It certainly wasn’t mine,’” Iggulden said in a video released by the company.

Iggulden had largely given up on seeing Genghis reach the screen. The novels begin with a family abandoned in one of the world’s most hostile landscapes and eventually expand into battles, armies and an empire. Previous attempts never got past that scale.

Before production, Authors First showed him what that world and its characters could look like on screen. Early images of the characters and landscape led to months of biweekly video meetings with the production team as the first six-episode season took shape.

Iggulden says he initially misunderstood what AI filmmaking would involve. “At first, I thought it was a magic wand—you type in a prompt and it spits out a finished product,” he said in written responses provided through the company’s PR firm. Instead, he became involved in the screenplay, casting, storyboarding, editing and rough cuts.

Some of the most consequential decisions were small ones.

In one scene, Temujin’s older brother Bekter mistreats the young woman he is to marry. Her first screen version looked too physically fragile to Iggulden.

“She looked too frail, which made Bekter more monstrous than he actually needed to be,” he says. “He needed to be a bad kid, but he was still a kid. He wasn’t a monster.”

The team reworked her. Iggulden also pushed for the low doors of Mongol tents, which forced anyone entering to stoop and briefly exposed them to attack.

But final cut did not mean every visual idea originated with the novelist. The director developed a palette that associated Temujin with red and other characters with blue. “It was just an interesting sort of visual palette that would never have occurred to me,” Iggulden says.

Nor could the technology always produce what he wanted. In one line reading, a character needed to insist, “I didn’t do it,” with the emphasis on “I.” The synthetic performance repeatedly failed to put the stress on the word.

Iggulden is not feeding a novel into a system and approving the result. He is making narrative judgments about character, performance and visual detail, while the tools change how those decisions reach the screen.

The Math Behind A $14.99 Season

Hamwee, a longtime private equity investor, says each season will sell as a single purchase, released all at once. The first season of Genghis will cost $14.99 on the company’s own streaming app, with a founding preorder price of $9.99, Authors First said in written responses.

The company expects to sell the series on other digital storefronts through Filmhub, a distributor that places independent films and series on digital platforms, and plans consistent pricing across them. It has not yet named those storefronts or a release date.

The six episodes run about 200 minutes in total. Hamwee says the cost per minute will fall to $3,000 within a month or two, which would put a season of that length at about $600,000 of direct cost.

Most of the cost is labor. Hamwee says every episode starts with a human-written screenplay and 500 to 600 hand-drawn storyboards before any image or video generation. The company employs 30 to 35 people, all from film and television production, and he says compute accounts for 20% to 25% of cost.

Founding authors receive an option fee, and the company recovers its costs at $2,000 a minute, with no allowance for marketing. On a 200-minute season, Authors First can recover up to $400,000 of production cost. Revenue remaining after that recovery is split 50/50 for the life of the series.

Authors First owns the screen series. The author shares half of any merchandise or other derivative revenue and keeps the live-action rights. “I’m not just handing over rights for a lump sum,” Iggulden said in the same responses.

Hamwee’s case is that Hollywood will not fund books like these. “It’s just really hard to make a $500 million bet on the Mongols or on Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth universe,” he says. Authors First has three projects in production, a fourth due by year-end and releases planned through 2027.

Its announced slate includes Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star and adaptations of books by David Ball and R.A. Salvatore.

Turning Readers Into Buyers

The commercial test is units. At 10,000 purchases, a season grosses about $150,000, which Hamwee says “doesn’t work.” He puts the target at roughly 100,000. At the other end, he calls 1 million purchases “a home run.”

“It is a bet,” he says. “We just, we don’t know.”

Those economics will shape how far the series runs. Hamwee says each of the five Conqueror novels would become two seasons if the first one sells. Work on the second has already started.

Authors First is targeting existing readers first. Hamwee says the company’s advertising, run through standard digital ad networks, will start with people who have read the novels, followed by genre fans and viewers curious about the technology.

Hamwee also acknowledges limits in the finished product. “No one’s going to win the Academy Award for best acting anytime soon,” he says. For Iggulden, those limitations have not diminished the experience. “To have it turned back into a visual medium is just joyous,” he says.

Authors First has made one part of the adaptation problem cheaper and given Iggulden considerably more control over the version that gets made. The remaining question is whether that combination can convert readers into paying viewers.

Final cut settles whose version of Genghis reaches the screen. It does not settle how many readers will choose to watch it.