Gossip Goblin x Showrunner Competition 2026: How to Enter the $20,000 Ripper Doc Contest by December 15

Your film must run 2 to 20 minutes, be generated in Showrunner Studio on an active subscription, carry the official competition watermark, and start with a client sitting down in a Ripper Doc's chair. There is no entry fee. Winners are announced January 15. com/gossip-goblin on November 1, 2026, and everything below comes from those rules unless we name another source.

Who runs it and why it exists

Showrunner is the AI show-making platform from Fable Studio, the San Francisco company led by Edward Saatchi, who co-founded Oculus Story Studio. Decrypt reported in 2025 that Amazon's Alexa Fund invested in Fable, and that Showrunner runs on Fable's own model, SHOW-2. The platform lets you build a cast, a world and episodes that other people can watch and remix.

Gossip Goblin is Zack London, a 35-year-old Los Angeles native now based in Sweden who worked on VR at Facebook and Oculus before he started making AI films. Screen Daily puts his following at 1.4 million. His preview short Pomegranate (27 minutes 56 seconds) went up free on YouTube on July 22, 2026, which is also the date the official rules give as the contest's start. Submissions opened August 5. The Daring Creatives reports the video has been set to private since September 17.

The contest is a lead-in to his first feature, Gods Don't Give Gifts, an R-rated anthology of four stories made with Fable. Per Net Influencer's October 7 report, the US release moved from October 30 to December 4, 2026 so it can run a Best Animated Feature campaign, on fewer than 1,000 screens. Screen Daily reports AGC International will sell it to international buyers at the AFM, November 10 to 15. So the people judging these films have a theatrical release to promote, and that tells you what they will want to see.

The brief, in one paragraph

The theme is Hidden Desires. Down a back alley, a Ripper Doc, a biomechanic who installs experiences directly into the mind, is still open. The doctor and the clinic are given to you. You supply the client and the secret they have kept for years. The film starts as they sit down and the session begins, and the official page sums up the arc as what they wanted, what they got and what they became. Any genre is allowed. The one rule of the world is that the story starts in that chair.

That is a tight brief, and it helps you. Every entry opens on the same image, so judges will be comparing hundreds of films that share a first shot. What separates them is the desire you choose and what the procedure costs the client. A clever reveal in minute 14 will not save a film whose first 90 seconds look like everyone else's.

The full rules, and the three that trip people up

The full rules add several conditions the summary on the page leaves out:

1. Every entry must be generated in Showrunner Studio using an active subscription. Entry is free, but the subscription is not. Showrunner's about page lists no prices, and 2025 coverage reported Fable planned to charge $10 to $20 a month for credits, so check the current plan inside Studio before you budget.

2. You may download your generated footage and edit it elsewhere, and add your own sound design, music or voiceover. That means DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, ElevenLabs voices or a composer friend are all fair game in the finishing stage.

3. The final video must clearly show the official watermark, which Studio provides.

4. Every film must include the provided Ripper Doc character and use the Gossip Goblin world style. Other styles are allowed, particularly inside implanted memories or mental manipulation.

5. Everything must be original and made for this contest. Additional characters and assets must be yours, and third-party copyrighted material or existing IP is banned.

6. Obscene, offensive or defamatory material can be disqualified at the judges' discretion.

7. Do not post the film on social media before you submit it, and anything you post afterwards must carry the watermark.

The three that catch people out are the style rule, the posting rule and the IP rule. The style rule is also the most useful one: the only sanctioned place to break from the house look is inside the client's head, so the installed memory is where your film can look different from every other entry. The posting rule means no teaser on X or TikTok while you are still editing. The IP rule rules out fan cameos, a famous song in the temp track, or a client who is obviously a real celebrity.

How the $20,000 is split, and what each award rewards

Best Film takes $15,000, which is 75% of the pool, so this contest is built to make one winner. The other four awards are smaller, but each one tells you something.

People's Choice ($2,000) is the only award decided by an audience. The rules do not say how voting works, and they bar posting before you submit, so the order is: submit first, then post a watermarked cut and send people to vote.

Best Screenplay ($1,000) is the award a strong writer can win without the best visuals. Gods Don't Give Gifts is an anthology, and Gossip Goblin's studio says every story is imagined, written and directed by humans. A tight script with one clear turn suits that.

Best Visuals ($1,000) rewards the implanted-memory sequence most, since that is the only place the rules invite a new look.

Best Performance ($1,000) is unusual for an AI contest. Showrunner lets you set each character's voice and personality, and you can replace or add voiceover in finishing. A recorded human voice for the client, used within the rules on originality, is the clearest way to compete here.

The rules do not name judges, publish scoring weights or say whether one film can win more than one award. If those matter to you, ask Fable at info@fablesimulation.com before you commit weeks of work.

A six-week plan from November 1

There are 44 days between November 1 and December 15. Here is how we would use them.

Week 1 (Nov 1 to 7): Open Studio from the Ripper Doc start page and spend a session learning what the world style looks like in motion. Write ten one-line desires and keep the two that would cost the client something specific.

Week 2 (Nov 8 to 14): Write the script. Five to eight minutes is enough to land a turn and short enough to finish well. Decide what the implanted experience looks like and how it breaks from the clinic's style.

Weeks 3 and 4 (Nov 15 to 28): Generate. Do the chair scene first, because every judge sees that before anything else.

Week 5 (Nov 29 to Dec 5): Download and finish outside Studio: edit, sound design, music, any human voice work. Confirm the watermark is visible in the export.

Week 6 (Dec 6 to 12): Submit through the Gossip Goblin callout in Studio or the contest's submit page. Then post your watermarked cut and start the People's Choice push.

Keep December 13 to 15 as spare days. December 15 is a Tuesday, and 11:59 PM PST is 7:59 AM UTC on December 16.

How it compares with other December AI film contests

The Gossip Goblin competition is one of several company-run AI contests closing in December, and each locks you to its own tool. AKOOL's AI Film Challenge closes December 20 and pays a $50,000 Grand Prize but requires meaningful use of AKOOL. The NEXTALE Award closes December 14 and pays $2,000 for a complete series of 20 or more episodes. The MetaMorph x TapNow winter round closes December 30 with £500 and requires at least half the film made in TapNow.

If you would rather use Runway, Kling, Veo, Sora or Seedance, the open-tool options are Artefact in Paris (December 2, €10,000 Grand Prix, 314-second cap), Curious Refuge's holiday competition (December 6, $7,500+, free) and Chroma Awards Season 2 (January 7, 2027, $450,000+, free). Showrunner footage cannot easily be reused for those, since the Ripper Doc character, the world style and the watermark belong to this contest. Treat it as its own project and plan a separate film for the others.

What we do not know yet

The official rules, read November 1, 2026, do not say who the judges are, how People's Choice votes are counted, whether entrants must be a minimum age, or whether any countries are excluded. One entry in our own database said entrants must be 18 or older; the full rules do not say that, and we have flagged it for correction. The Showrunner iOS app is marked as coming soon to the USA, but the web Studio is where you make and submit your entry. We will update this page if Fable publishes judges or voting details before December 15.