Alex Proyas Returns with Heaven: Sci-Fi and AI at the Marché

Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) is stepping back into the big league with Heaven, a project he has been pursuing for years and which has now been brought back into the spotlight by Ex Machina Studios and K5 International, who will present it at the Cannes Marché du Film. This is not a film announced for competition, but a market title: meaning presales, negotiations, casting discussions, and one very clear promise to place in front of buyers — to bring Proyas back to the science fiction that belongs to him, using an AI-enabled production pipeline to build larger worlds without destroying the budget.

The 2026 Cannes market runs from May 12 to 20, and the project arrives there with a pitch that is already clear enough, and provocative enough, to stand out.

What is Alex Proyas’ Heaven about?

The story follows a desperate bureaucrat who escapes a collapsing life by entering a technologically perfect afterlife, only to discover that this paradise is an illusion built with disturbing consequences. That alone makes it clear why Heaven feels like a natural project for Proyas: control, simulation, artificial architectures, a promise of salvation that turns into a nightmare.

The production describes it as a dark satire in the tradition of Brazil by Terry Gilliam, a poisonous dystopia and the nightmare of the bureaucratic machine. After a decade away from feature directing, following 2016’s Gods of Egypt, Proyas returns with a title that seems designed to reconnect with his most recognizable imaginative territory: Dark City, and in other ways, I, Robot too.

AI in Heaven: tool or slogan?

The truly interesting point, however, is another one: Heaven is not being sold only as the new Alex Proyas film, but as a practical demonstration of Ex Machina Studios’ industrial model. The company, launched in January by Marco Weber, Martin Weisz and Tom Ryan, says it wants to use “ethical” AI, built around real actors, human-written stories and union-compatible practices, with the aim of cutting the costs that now suffocate much of production.

It is the perfect language of 2026: AI not as the openly declared replacement of humans, but as an invisible infrastructure that makes possible what was once too expensive. On paper, it sounds reassuring. In practice, the film will have to prove whether this is really a defense of authorship or simply a more elegant way to sell the same industrial revolution with a presentable face.

For now, what is concrete are the presales handled by K5, the main work expected to take place in Los Angeles, and casting discussions already underway. Icon, which had been attached to the project years ago, is no longer involved. Proyas has described Heaven as a true passion project, while Weber presents it as the ideal meeting point between the director’s vision and Ex Machina’s pipeline.

Adult, visionary science fiction may still exist. But even the old masters, by now, have to come to terms with the new technological owners of production.