$70M AI Bitcoin Movie Casts Wright as Satoshi

Highlights

A new $70 million film titled Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, directed by Doug Liman, dramatizes the search for Bitcoin's creator and casts Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The film stars Gal Gadot, Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, and Isla Fisher, and is billed as the first fully AI-generated, studio-quality feature film.
A UK High Court ruled in 2024 that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, a fact the film's own marketing acknowledges has been “debunked by some, including a U.K. court.”
The movie remains in post-production without a confirmed US distributor, after being shopped to buyers earlier this year.

A new film called Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi has entered post-production with a reported $70 million budget, a cast led by Gal Gadot, Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, and Isla Fisher, and direction from Doug Liman. The conspiracy thriller centers on the search for Bitcoin's true creator and casts Affleck as Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who has long claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, in a story built around a journalist investigating whether that claim is real. The casting is notable given that a UK High Court definitively ruled in 2024, in a case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, that Wright is not Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator — a ruling the film's own marketing acknowledges even as its plot leans into the claim.

An AI-Generated Production Built Around a Contested Claim

According to an exclusive report from TheWrap, the production is being billed as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film, made by production company Acme AI & FX. The approach reportedly let the filmmakers shoot the human performances over just 20 days on a custom soundstage, with AI generating the backgrounds, lighting, and broader visual environment in post-production while leaving the actors' own performances untouched — a process the filmmakers say let them deliver a film of a scale that would traditionally cost around $300 million for closer to a quarter of that price.

In the plot, Gadot plays Lotte, a war correspondent and former fashion model recruited by crypto and gambling entrepreneur Calvin Ayre to investigate Wright's claim to be Satoshi, in a story that frames Wright as having survived numerous assassination attempts and asks, per the film's own synopsis, why powerful figures spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Crypto Open Patent Alliance's legal campaign “to destroy one man.” That framing runs directly counter to the outcome of COPA's actual lawsuit, which the UK High Court decided firmly against Wright after reviewing forensic evidence about the Bitcoin whitepaper and early code.

Why the Casting Is Already Controversial

For the Bitcoin community, the film is likely to reopen a long-running and unusually bitter dispute rather than settle it. Wright's Satoshi claim has been one of the most contentious storylines in Bitcoin's history and culture — contested by early developers, dismissed by cryptographers who reviewed his purported proof-of-identity signatures, and ultimately rejected by a UK court after a lengthy trial that examined years of forged-looking documents. A big-budget dramatization that stages the claim sympathetically, regardless of the film's other artistic merits, risks presenting a legally settled question as an open one to a mainstream audience with no independent way to check the film's version of events against the court record.

That risk is compounded by the AI-production angle itself, which is likely to draw as much attention as the Wright storyline. A $70 million, AI-generated feature from major stars lands at a moment when Hollywood is already anxious about AI's role in filmmaking, and its success or failure in finding a distributor could become its own bellwether for how the industry treats AI-assisted productions independent of the Bitcoin controversy wrapped around it — a very different kind of spotlight than the one Bitcoin culture usually gets at events like Bitcoin Asia.

What Happens Next

The film remains without a confirmed distributor after being shopped to buyers earlier this year, so the next concrete milestone is whether Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi lands a distribution deal and an actual release date — until then, its content is unlikely to be broadly seen beyond festival or trade coverage. Watch for how the film's marketing handles the Wright-Satoshi question as a release date approaches, given that its own synopsis already acknowledges the UK court's ruling while still building its narrative around Wright's claim. Also worth watching: the Bitcoin community's reaction once fuller footage or a trailer surfaces, particularly from cryptographers and early developers who were directly involved in the real COPA litigation.

FAQ

What is Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi about?
It's a $70 million conspiracy thriller directed by Doug Liman that dramatizes the search for Bitcoin's creator, casting Casey Affleck as Craig Wright and Gal Gadot as a journalist investigating his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Did a court really rule on whether Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Yes. A UK High Court ruled in 2024, in a case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, that Wright is not Bitcoin's creator, a ruling the film's own marketing acknowledges.

What makes this an “AI-generated” film?
The production is billed as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film, with human performances shot over 20 days on a soundstage and AI used to generate backgrounds and lighting in post-production.

When will the film be released?
No release date has been confirmed. As of this writing, the film remains in post-production without a confirmed US distributor after being shopped to buyers earlier this year.