Spencer Pratt’s AI ‘Star Wars’ Ad Is Changing Campaign Playbooks

Spencer Pratt just made a campaign ad that looks like it cost $200 million — and it probably cost a fraction of that, because AI did the heavy lifting.

The Hills alum and Los Angeles mayoral candidate dropped a blockbuster-style AI-generated video this week that has people genuinely talking — not just about the race, but about what political advertising is going to look like from here on out. The clip features Pratt soaring through a burning, destroyed Los Angeles on a futuristic vehicle ripped straight from the Star Wars universe, while AI-generated versions of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass deliver villain monologues about the city’s decline.

“You didn’t finish burning the city to the ground in your first term. Make sure you finish the job in your second,” the AI Newsom says with a grin. AI Bass gets her own line — “The only thing that can stop us is someone telling the truth. As long as they don’t have any hope, the city’s ours” — before the two face off in a lightsaber duel, with the citizens of Los Angeles eventually pulling out their own lightsabers to fight back.

It’s absurd. It’s slick. And it’s working.

A Campaign Built for the Scroll

The Star Wars video is just the latest in a run of viral campaign content from Pratt that has turned a long-shot celebrity candidacy into something the political world is actually paying attention to. A few weeks ago he uploaded a video set to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” contrasting the untouched properties of Bass and City Councilwoman Nithya Raman with the charred ruins where his own Pacific Palisades home once stood — and the trailer he’s been living in since the 2025 wildfires tore through the neighborhood.

Now he’s added a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air parody to the mix. TMZ caught the new ad, which shows a truck towing Pratt’s now-famous Airstream trailer through the streets and pulling into Bel-Air, while Pratt raps about losing his home in the fires and relocating — taking shots at Bass along the way. It’s a wink at the earlier controversy over where exactly Pratt was actually sleeping: he’d declared “This is where I live” while standing in front of the trailer on his burned lot, before it emerged he’d been staying at the ritzy Hotel Bel-Air. Rather than run from it, he leaned in and made it content.

BlazeTV hosts Pat Gray and Keith Malinak reacted to the Star Wars ad with something close to awe. “If you don’t have a lot of money in your campaign, you just let AI take over,” Malinak said. Gray went further: “I think we’re seeing a complete change in the political advertising world from now on. There’s going to be a lot of that kind of stuff, AI-generated things.”

“I hope it works out for Spencer Pratt,” Malinak added. “If they were ever going to get Republican leadership, it’s this cycle.”

The Nonpartisan Candidate With a Republican Backbone

Pratt has been careful to present himself as something other than a party candidate. “All my supporters in Los Angeles are Democrats,” he told CBS. “Everyone I know, my family, are all Democrats.” To NBC, he was even more direct: “When you vote for Spencer Pratt on your ballot today or tonight, it’ll say Spencer Pratt, community advocate because that’s how I identify. I do not represent a party. I don’t have a campaign manager. I don’t have campaign consultants. There’s no political party backing me.”

But a closer look at his campaign infrastructure tells a different story. According to city disclosure filings reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter, Pratt’s campaign headquarters is a boutique tax service agency in Imperial Beach, San Diego County, run by the wife of former GOP congressman Brian Bilbray. Their daughter — a former Republican Party delegate — serves as Pratt’s treasurer, with a listed email tied to an entity called “BB Campaigns” that has no public footprint to speak of.

His fundraising events, including intimate April gatherings in Beverly Hills and Mandeville Canyon, were organized in part by Pluvious Group, an L.A.-based political consulting firm with a distinctly right-wing client list: Donald Trump, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, and California Rep. Mike Garcia, among others. Pluvious also helped elect Nathan Hochman as Los Angeles D.A. in 2024 — Hochman ran as an independent after previously losing as a Republican. The firm has its own baggage: California’s Fair Political Practices Commission found it had set up illegal campaign donations and was aware of a money laundering scheme during a state-level race.

Pratt’s spokesperson — who has worked with him and wife Heidi Montag long before the campaign launched in January — didn’t respond to THR’s questions about the campaign’s key staffers and consultants.

Incumbent Mayor Bass still leads in the latest polls heading into the June 2 election. Pratt and progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman are competing for the second spot that would get them into the November 3 runoff. Raman has called him a “MAGA Republican.” He’s called her a “Ramanchurian Candidate.”

Why the Political World Is Taking Notes

Whatever happens on June 2, Pratt has stumbled onto something real. His campaign is almost entirely built around emotional, high-energy social media content aimed directly at Angelenos who are exhausted by homelessness, the fentanyl crisis, mismanaged city services, and the raw grief of the wildfires. He’s not holding town halls — he’s making videos that people actually watch and share.

About 51% of Gen Z teenagers get their news primarily from social media, and adult consumption of social media news is climbing steadily. The candidates who figure that out first have a real advantage — and Pratt, who spent years building a reality TV persona on The Hills, understands the camera and the audience in a way most politicians simply don’t.

Commentators have drawn a direct line from Pratt’s approach back to Trump’s 2016 and 2024 campaigns — the entertainer-as-candidate model, where the message lands through feeling rather than policy papers. “Make America Great Again” worked because it was simple and visceral. Pratt’s trailer-on-the-burned-lot imagery works for the same reason. You don’t need a speechwriter when you have a charred foundation and a camera.

The Star Wars ad, though, is something new. It’s not just emotional — it’s cinematic, shareable, and cheap to produce in a way that would’ve been impossible even two years ago. If it helps Pratt punch through in a city that hasn’t elected a Republican mayor in nearly three decades, campaigns everywhere will be paying attention.

“I think we’re seeing a complete change in the political advertising world from now on,” Gray said. He might not be wrong.