Cappu Films Boards Generative AI Thriller 'Overstake' for Busan

Hong Kong's Cappu Films has taken worldwide sales rights to "Overstake," a sci-fi action thriller from writer-director Stas Mareev that rebuilds a live-action shoot through generative AI. The company is introducing the title to buyers at the Busan International Film Festival's Asian Contents & Film Market.

The film follows a wounded veteran who enters a deadly betting game for a life-changing payout. He has two hours to cross an industrial city and keep his ex-wife alive. Strangers receive offers on their phones to save him or stop him in his tracks, and the game's organizers turn the pair's fight for survival into a show.

The cast includes Konstantin Adaev, Vika Tokareva, Oleg Chernov, Konstantin Sidikhin, Denis Starkov and Sergey Russkin.

What does the generative AI rebuild mean?

"Overstake" is not a film built from scratch with AI. Mareev shot it as a live-action feature and is now using generative AI to reconstruct its settings at a scale the original production could not achieve.

"'Overstake' is a chance to return to a film I already directed and rebuild its world at a scale that was impossible for us before," Mareev said. "The performances and story remain the foundation, while generative AI allows me to rethink the environments, action and visual language without losing the human core of the film."

The approach keeps the actors' performances and the screenplay intact, and applies AI to the environments, action staging and visual language. That distinction positions the film within an ongoing industry debate: whether generative AI can expand what mid-budget genre films can achieve on screen without replacing the human elements of production.

The AI work is still in progress. Buyers in Busan will see a promo reel along with a handful of finished sequences — meaning the market presentation is a sales pitch on a partially completed product rather than a finished film.

Who is selling it, and why?

Janice Woo of Cappu Films said the genre fit drove the acquisition. "We've handled international sales for many films in this genre, and sci-fi and action are particular strengths for Cappu," Woo said. "We were impressed by Stas's promo and look forward to introducing the film to our distribution partners in Busan."

Cappu's Busan slate extends well beyond "Overstake." The lineup also includes:

• "Banr"
• "Fox Hunt"
• "Ephemera," Shan Jiang's Tribeca title
• "Operation Doolittle," a WWII spy series told across nine episodes
• "Lion Fist," a martial arts film
• "Her Last Laugh," an Australian dramedy directed by Joy Hopwood
• "Zombie Plane," an action comedy toplined by Vanilla Ice, Sophie Monk and Chuck Norris

Why does this deal matter?

The Busan market presentation will test whether international distributors are ready to buy a film whose visual world is being regenerated by AI after principal photography. Mareev frames the technology as an expansion of a completed directorial work rather than a substitute for it, and his quote makes the argument explicit: performances and story stay; environments, action and visual language get rethought.

How buyers respond to the promo and the finished sequences in Busan may signal how AI-assisted remakes of existing live-action footage — not just AI-generated originals — fit into the independent genre market.