The Hollywood Singularity Has Arrived
The biggest movie studio in the United States just declared that AI is the future of filmmaking
The Memorial Day holiday weekend in the United States is when many box office legends are made, usually accounting for a significant portion of yearly revenue for Hollywood studios. However, the usual box office booster delivered a stunning 29-year low this year. Warner Bros. Pictures’ Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga disappointed by bringing in only $26.3 million during its opening weekend, followed by Sony Pictures’ The Garfield Movie, which drew just $24 million.
Many in the Hollywood community believed that the effects of the pandemic’s crippling box office closures from March 2020 up until about 2022 were in the rearview mirror. The 2023 release of Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid pulled in a respectable $95.5 million Memorial Day weekend haul, hinting that things might be returning to normal for the movie business.
Nevertheless, a combination of factors has dramatically changed the film landscape. Most notable is the new pandemic-inspired habit of shortened theatrical runs as studios now rush movies to streaming platforms. Universal Pictures’ The Fall Guy was released in theaters on May 3, and despite a positive reception from audiences, the film was moved to streaming just a few weeks later on May 21. Historically, an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt might enjoy a long summer run in theaters, but that is no longer the case.
Another major speed bump for Hollywood came from the creative community in the form of two strikes in 2023. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), the union representing screenwriters, went on strike after failing to find common ground with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the organization representing the largest movie and television studios. The nearly five-month-long strike finally ended in September 2023 after an agreement was reached.
Not long after the WGA strike began, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) also went on strike. That action started in July and ended in November 2023. The new contract wasn’t ratified until December 5.
Those two labor union work stoppages disrupted the production and development schedules of a mountain of film projects which were designed to help speed the recovery of the movie business to pre-pandemic box office highs. There have been such strikes in Hollywood before, but the recent rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) as a potential new commercial filmmaking tool further stoked fears among many creative workers in the industry, putting the technology at the center of already complicated negotiating tables.
The beginning of the end of the AI filmmaking debate, courtesy of Sony
Some of the loud concerns from traditional filmmakers about AI have somewhat quieted since the end of the strikes. But as AI tools improve seemingly weekly, movie studios have become increasingly interested in the technology, despite the handwringing from some in Hollywood.
Perhaps the boldest studio executive voice to emerge in the conversation around using AI to make films came this week from Tony Vinciquerra, the CEO of Sony Pictures. On Wednesday, during Sony’s investor-focused Business Segment Meeting 2024 event, Vinciquerra didn’t tiptoe around the topic of AI filmmaking.
“We had an eight-month strike over AI last year, [involving] both actors and writers. [AI] was one of the primary drivers of that strike,” said Vinciquerra during the investor meeting. “Actors and writers want to be protected from AI. And we're right now in the midst of negotiating with IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), a crew union, and we will be negotiating with the Teamsters union soon, both over AI again, [that] will be a primary factor in those negotiations.”
Buried in an investor presentation, the AI filmmaking comments from Vinciquerra might seem like mere policy chatter in the interest of formalizing union deals. But when I looked closer at the overall Sony presentation, it became clear that the studio is far more serious about AI than many might guess.
Just before Vinciquerra’s presentation, Rob Stringer, the CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, delivered a few revealing AI comments around the topic of AI in music.
“Artificial Intelligence represents a generational inflection point of music and content in general. A sustainable business rights model needs to be established and respected, and we will take an active role in bringing one about,” said Stringer, whose comments indicate that he may have been paying attention when King Willonius (a recent Hundred Year Podcast guest) delivered the first true AI music hit (“BBL Drizzy”) a couple of months ago.
“AI will be a multi-dimensional tool for creativity, scalability, and efficiency in our industry. According to a recent FBI survey, nearly 80% of music fans say human ingenuity is essential to the creation of music. Our focus right now is on building transparent and fair partnerships with those expanding solutions in the AI stratosphere. In the last year, we have convened with more than 350 organizations in the technology space across the globe to set up these initiatives. We will go where our artist wants to go creatively with AI while protecting their rights at every step, and we look to find common ground with our future partners in this era.”
Still, Stringer was careful to point out that the music giant is also working to monitor and protect how its intellectual property is being used in the new era of AI.
“Whilst we are optimistic about this direction, we are not naive about how complex protecting our art form will be. We won't tolerate illicit training of AI models by reckless and unlicensed misuse of this art,” said Stringer.
“We believe strongly that permission is the only way AI models can be trained with our content, and followed protocols of the EU AI Act by sending over 700 letters to AI developers to opt our copyrights out of training. We've issued over 20,000 takedowns of AI-generated soundalikes over the past year. We are constantly updating technology that allows us to identify and tag our music and video so that misuses are instantly recognized… With the right frameworks in place, innovation will thrive, technology music benefit, and consumers will enjoy new experiences.”
The recent dustup between actress Scarlett Johansson (who famously took on Disney in recent years) and OpenAI over the seeming similarity between her voice from the 2013 film Her and the new assistant voice in GPT-4o is just a glimpse at some of the legal battles the entertainment industry is likely to face in the next few years.
The lines separating Hollywood and tech are about to become indistinguishable
Sony has launched its own arm of AI research initiatives, but the studio will likely benefit and perhaps even partner with the more focused efforts of the increasingly competitive ranks of AI startups. A wide range of companies are working furiously to make generative AI content creation as powerful and seamless as the CGI tools many Hollywood studios rely on to build their film franchises.
Sony movie chief Vinciquerra hasn’t announced anything specific yet, but I’m betting that the first area the studio experiments with AI filmmaking will be in animation. For example, the abstract and often surreal imagery from the Spider-Verse franchise was painstakingly crafted using a mix of traditional and computer-assisted animation techniques. The result is a visual masterpiece.
Once upon a time, 3D animated films were looked down upon by animation purists. And then Pixar changed the game with its hit Toy Story. Suddenly, 3D animation was accepted as part of the professional animator’s toolbox. As some of the more innovative AI short films are proving, we’re probably not far from the same shift occurring in the film industry, it’s just a matter of which big (or independent) studio makes the first big splash using AI filmmaking techniques to touch the hearts of theatergoers.
“The agreements that came out of last year's strikes, and the agreements that come out of the IATSE and Teamster [negotiations] will define roughly what we can do with AI,” said Vinciquerra. “We are very focused on AI. The biggest problem with making films today is the expense and we need to find ways to produce films in a more efficient way, and we will be looking at ways to use AI to produce both film for theaters and television in a more efficient way using AI primarily.”