Abandoned Films Made the 1950s Super Panavision 70 Trailer Into a Genre, Then Hid Its Own First Year

In April 2024 a YouTube channel with seventeen thousand subscribers posted a 1950s trailer for Star Wars. Within three weeks it had put out a dozen more, been written up by PetaPixel and Creative Bloq, and tripled its audience. By that summer "Super Panavision 70" was a genre of its own, complete with tutorial livestreams, a video about how much YouTube pays for a million views of them, and a Simpsons version from demonflyingfox that has 2.4 million views.

The channel was Abandoned Films (@abandonedfilms on YouTube, and @abandonedmovies on X, on Instagram and on TikTok), and nobody has published who runs it. That anonymity is half of why it is worth studying. With no interview to lean on, everything known about the process comes from what the creator typed into video descriptions and hashtags over two years, and that turns out to be a complete tool-by-tool record of how AI trailers got made from Runway Gen-2 to Seedance 2.

The other half is what happened after the peak. At some point the channel's entire first year, including that Star Wars trailer, was made private, and the creator has been remaking the hits in newer tools instead. The about text now reads, in full: "The original Super Panavision 70 channel. All videos created with AI."

The format arrived in January 2024, then blew up in April

The channel opened on 14 December 2022 with still images: a Danny DeVito Spider-Man, a Fritz Lang Matrix from 1927, a Guillermo del Toro Bioshock. Spring 2023 was the Balenciaga phase that every AI account went through, and July 2023 brought the first Dos Equis-style commercial. The early Patreon pitch was the prompts themselves, plus commissions for the top tier.

The first "1950's Super Panavision 70" video was The Lord of the Rings, posted around 20 January 2024, with Game of Thrones two days behind it. An archived copy of the channel from that week shows the Tolkien one at 22,000 views. By March it had passed 220,000.

Then April happened. Star Wars went up on 4 April and cleared half a million views in eleven days, and Dune, Harry Potter, Shrek, The Avengers, The Terminator and The Walking Dead all landed inside the same fortnight. The 15 April snapshot shows 103 videos and 52,900 subscribers, up from 17,500 six weeks earlier. Creative Bloq and PetaPixel both covered it on 25 April. PetaPixel's piece said the videos were "largely coming from the Abandoned Films YouTube channel," and explained the name: Super Panavision 70 was a real 65mm process, and the 70 is the projection print.

The channel ignores the format's 2.20:1 ratio and posts in plain 16:9, which Digital Camera World noticed at the time. None of the outlets that covered it that spring said who posted the first one.

The description that lists the whole pipeline

The original Star Wars trailer is private now, but the archived watch page still holds its description in full: "Star Wars 1950's Super Panavision 70 style made with #midjourney #elevenlabs and #runwayai and edited in Premiere. Script by Chat GPT."

That is the whole recipe for the format, in the creator's own words: a script from ChatGPT, stills from Midjourney, motion from Runway, a narrator from ElevenLabs, and a cut in Premiere. It is also the only place ChatGPT and Premiere are ever credited.

The descriptions keep logging tools as the tools change. The Children of Húrin in July 2024 is "made with Midjourney, Kling AI and Eleven labs," under the line "We've just hit peak AI video generation." The Silmarillion, later that month, adds Luma for motion and credits the music to Audiomachine. In November 2024 the Starcraft description admits defeat on one front: "This was super difficult as Midjourney really wanted to make everything look like video game graphics or Warhammer 40k, so it's not as good as I wanted it to be. Everything is AI except the music."

The hashtags carry the rest of the timeline. Sora and Veo 2 appear in December 2024, Runway Gen-4 in April 2025, Veo 3 and Hailuo across the 2025 run, and Seedance 2 on the 2026 uploads. On Patreon, five dollars a month buys a five-minute tutorial on the Dos Equis spots whose public teaser starts, "Tools you will need: Elevenlabs...."

Why a trailer, and why 1959

There is no interview, so the reasons have to be read off the work.

A trailer is the one film form built entirely from shots that never have to connect. Two seconds of a face, two seconds of a landscape, a title card, a voice holding it all together. In early 2024 an image-to-video tool would give you a few seconds of slow drift from a still and then fall apart, and the trailer format asks for exactly that much and no more.

Creative Bloq described the result precisely: "Characters don't do much other than stare into the distance, and their appearance tends to morph before our eyes." In a 1950s trailer, staring into the distance is the acting.

The era does the same job for the picture. Technicolor grain, soft focus and stage lighting are what a 1959 print looks like, and they are also what an AI image looked like in 2024. The Dos Equis series works the same trick on a smaller scale: one man, one setting, one sentence per shot, and a narrator who has been doing this since before television.

Fourteen Dos Equis ads in one June

The May 2025 revival of the commercial format came with a note: "It's been almost 2 years since our first Dos Equis style AI commercial." What followed was the channel's most productive month. Fourteen spots went up in June 2025 alone: the most German, Italian, Mexican, English, Canadian, Jewish and Russian men in the world, a Neil deGrasse Tyson as the most condescending, and a run of Karens, hipsters, boomers and Reddit users through the summer.

The ideas are crowdsourced. The community tab is mostly posts like "Give me your ideas for 'The Most Canadian Man in the World,'" with a couple of hundred likes apiece. One of the series carries a lesson in its description: "A re-upload of The Most Reddit Man in the World. The previous one had a real person which had to be taken down."

A November 2025 spot, The Most Successful Investor in the World, is a sponsored ad for a real investment firm, the one paid placement the descriptions disclose. The Tolkien trailers all carry the line "This is a fanmade trailer, all character rights belong to the Tolkien Estate."

The first year is private, and the channel has been quiet since April

The channel had 103 videos on 15 April 2024. Today it has 65, and the oldest one still public is from 1 July 2024. Everything before that, including the original Star Wars, Dune, The Terminator and RoboCop trailers that Looper ranked among the best AI fan trailers ever made, now returns "Private video." No description, community post or Patreon note says why.

What the creator has done instead is remake them. Alien came back in March 2025 as "an updated version of my classic," and Starcraft in February 2026 as a remake in the current toolset. The about text calling itself "the original" channel was in place by May 2024, while the imitators were multiplying.

And they multiplied. demonflyingfox's Simpsons trailer in the same format went up that April and has 2.4 million views as of this month. Warden Cinematics posted a video about how much YouTube paid it for a million views of Super Panavision trailers, and a channel called PT5 ran a livestream on how to make them. Looper's ranked list credits nine different channels.

The last upload is The Most 90s Man in the World, from 23 April 2026. There were six videos in the first four months of the year, most of them drawing a fraction of what the 2025 spots did, with the Fall of Khazad-dûm trailer the exception at over 200,000 views. Nothing on any of the channel's accounts announces a break.

Where to go next

For the same instinct pointed at a different decade, STR4NGETHING's wrong-era fashion campaigns put Nike and Louis Vuitton on Renaissance figures, and built a theory about why it reads as right. And demonflyingfox, who borrowed the Super Panavision format for one very successful video, is now writing original songs for the same kind of satire.

The channel's Patreon still describes the concept the way it did in 2023: "to imagine films that could have existed, or might be made in the future," plus "movie mashups and films produced in another era or by a different director." As of September 2026 that is 65 public videos, 354,000 subscribers, and five months of silence.