Rise of the machines | Inside Hollywood’s AI civil war
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Hollywood is currently in the midst of an AI insurgency, though even that noun may not do the moment justice. Though still fragmented, the effort is increasingly looking like a full-on takeover, a Pixar-like artquake that aims to change the provenance of images, the business of production and (not to put too fine a point on it) the language of cinema itself.
The movement is building from several directions — from Hollywood-adjacent startups like Asteria and Runway AI; from AI-curious traditional entertainers like the directors James Cameron and Timur Bekmambetov and Lyonne and Darren Aronofsky (who’s partnered with Google DeepMind); from studio executives aflutter with the thought of massive cost savings; from an assortment of effects and other below-the-line specialists attracted to (if slightly wary of) the whizbangery; and, of course, from executives at companies like Google and OpenAI, who gaze upon the possibility of an automated Hollywood with the same disbelieving glee of an insulin dealer who has just stumbled upon a diabetic convention.
Veo 3 and Gen-4, Sora and Luma — the names of the generative video products at the center of the movement carry an abstract, almost ersatz quality. What can these things do, we wonder, and what will they make us do? But if their branding feels opaque, their goal couldn’t be clearer: for a machine to create, with just the slightest nudging from us, the kind of cinema that for more than a century only could exist when a group of people got together in a physical space to construct and record it.