Hideo Kojima, the celebrated director behind Metal Gear and Death Stranding, is a known movie sicko. Now that he’s got the cache to do so, he’s been making some pivots to work on movies alongside games, like the upcoming Death Stranding film. But before he actually makes a movie, he’s working with fashion company Prada and Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, the face of Heartman in the Death Stranding series, on a short film. But don’t get too excited, as it’s a piece of AI-generated slop.
The short film is part of Prada’s upcoming Mode event taking place in New York from June 3 to 7, and it “stars” Winding Refn and Kojima as space travelers doing things that barely cohere as a story and eventually ending up at the Chelsea Hotel where the Prada event will take place next month. Winding Refn released a short teaser of the full six-minute video, and it’s more than enough to see that it’s a nostalgia play desperately clinging to the aesthetic of ‘50s sci-fi movies, and also looks like shit.
✨See You in New York✨@Prada
With@Kojima_Hideo @kuhlandhan @camsugarmusic pic.twitter.com/HrClMNocqB— byNWR Official (@NicolasWR) May 26, 2026
“Throughout our extended friendship, Hideo Kojima and I have shared the feeling that we were somehow split from the same consciousness moving through different lives while orbiting the same obsessions,” Winding Refn said in a statement about the project. That idea became the spark for a film: a space odyssey following us as we traverse a sci-fi dreamscape. Created in collaboration with Prada, the project is both an artistic experiment and a playful exploration of new creative possibilities through AI technology.”
Gross. Looking at it, I’m somewhat surprised Kojima signed off on the short film considering how awkward and stilted it looks, but he has gone on record as saying he thinks AI will be just as significant to game development as the jump to 3D was, and that he thinks of the plagiarism machine as “a friend,” so maybe this passes the smell test for him. I think he should get better friends, like human beings who could do the work he and Winding Refn are trying to avoid entirely by putting prompts in a generator to make it look like they went on cool space adventures in an effort to jingle keys in front of out-of-touch rich people who can’t stop pontificating about how cool it is that we’re ripping the humanity out of all our art to cut costs.