Before the dust even settles in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, the unlikely breakout star may be Charles Curran.
The 35‑year‑old Hollywood filmmaker is the mind behind the Batman‑themed AI ad that energized the bid of the relatively unknown Republican candidate Spencer Pratt, sending half the field scrambling and rewriting the rules of political advertising overnight.
But Mr. Curran didn’t show up as a hired gun. He showed up as a frustrated Angeleno.
“I go up to the farmers’ market every Monday, and there’s people with jackets over their heads smoking crack around children,” he told The Washington Times. “There’s needles on the ground. It’s not hyperbole. It’s just something that we’ve all kind of become numb to.”
He’d had enough — and he had a tool.
For three years, Mr. Curran, who grew up in Chicago, had been quietly building Menace Studios, a four‑person AI filmmaking shop built on a simple idea: AI would do for filmmaking what digital cameras did a generation ago — democratize it and blow up the gatekeepers.
So when Mr. Pratt emerged channeling the same frustration with City Hall, Mr. Curran and his team didn’t wait for permission. They just started making ads — for free.
Mr. Curran describes him as “not a Democrat,” and their Pratt operation as more of a jam band than a traditional media shop: ideas popped up, they batted them around, and, if they seemed funny, particularly the next morning, they made them. A video takes three to nine hours. Mr. Curran made the Batman ad himself.
That viral spot cracked the code — a jarring, unexpected piece of political messaging that helped lift Mr. Pratt from fringe candidate to runoff contender and landed Menace Studios ads on Fox News, CNN, Joe Rogan and local newscasts nationwide. After Menace jumped in, Mr. Pratt began dramatically out-raising his rivals, including Mayor Karen Bass, who has been a staple of local politics.
Mr. Pratt didn’t win.
But Dan Schnur, a political science professor at the University of California‑Berkeley and a former consultant, said the videos fundamentally changed the race — and maybe something bigger.
No one watching the Batman ad — or the Star Wars‑inspired spot — thought the Caped Crusader or Luke Skywalker were actually running for mayor, Mr. Schnur noted. What the videos did instead was give Mr. Pratt’s anger about crime, homelessness and civic dysfunction a jolt — reaching people who normally tune out politics.
“Lots of candidates can stand up and say, ’I’m really mad about this,’” Mr. Schnur said. “The videos gave that message a jolt.”
Mr. Curran’s critique of the industry is blunt: political advertising has become stale and formulaic, recycling the same paint‑by‑numbers messaging for decades. Mr. Schnur agrees, calling consultants risk‑averse and the world’s best imitators — and he has little doubt that smart operatives in both parties have spent the spring watching and learning.
Menace’s philosophy runs deeper than aesthetics. Mr. Curran grew up in Chicago, competed in policy debate, studied filmmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design, spent nearly a decade in New York where he finished his first documentary, then worked in commercial and fashion production before landing in Hollywood.
He says he and his team are history nerds who trace their lineage to Thomas Nast, the 19th‑century cartoonist whose caricatures helped topple the Tammany Hall Democratic Party political machine in New York.
“You basically need a filmmaker who’s incredibly good at storytelling, that understands memetics, that understands politics, and then understands how to do that at scale,” Mr. Curran said. “The technical aspect is probably the easiest part.”
That’s why he doesn’t think the old guard will simply adopt the tools and catch up.
“When you see all these political consultants saying, ’OK, you guys need to do AI now’ — these are the people that have been making the same political ads for the last 50 years,” Mr. Curran said. “I don’t think those are going to be the people that understand what we’ve done.”
He’s also blunt about why he thinks the approach works better for the right than the left.
“On the right, you could say the homeless situation has become a problem,” he said. “On the left, you would get an infographic explaining why this is not true and even the observation is problematic.”
The response from the political world, he said, has been overwhelming — and bipartisan.
“It’s the entire spectrum,” Mr. Curran said, declining to name names. “Anyone you can imagine.”
With the race over, he’s thinking bigger. The same technology that turned a four‑person shop into a viral political force, he argues, is about to do the same to Hollywood — stripping out the massive budgets and what he calls “recycled slop.”
“Hollywood has always been driven by technological change,” Mr. Curran said. “I think this is going to be no different.”
He sees echoes of the 1970s, when a new generation reinvented an atrophied studio system. And he pushes back against fears about deepfakes, casting Menace’s work in an entirely different tradition.
“I view this as the evolution of political satire,” Mr. Curran said. “Like Mark Twain. Like Tammany Hall.”
Mr. Schnur said that whatever happens to Mr. Pratt, Mr. Curran’s impact on the 2026 midterms is already locked in.
“Whether Spencer Pratt ever runs for elective office again or not, Charlie Curran is going to have a formative impact on political messaging this fall and beyond,” he said.
For Mr. Curran, the point is bigger than any one campaign.
“A lot of people, after Citizens United [the Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that struck down campaign finance restrictions], decried that normal people wouldn’t have a voice,” he said.
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