How AI Is Overtaking Hollywood

AI is enabling fans to go where ‘Peacemaker’ cannot – but not everyone is happy

Warner Bros

Ever since the dawn of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hollywood has been waging a war against it on the grounds that it could bring the curtain down on traditional film-making. However, recent comments from superstar director James Gunn shine a spotlight on how studios actually open the door for the technology to flourish.

At the outset of any discussion about Generative AI it’s important to point out the difference between it and other forms of the technology.

In short, Generative AI can be used to create content, such as text, images, audio or video, based on patterns it learns from massive amounts of existing data. It can produce photorealistic videos as their components are derived from existing footage and the program can also predict the next element in a sequence, like a word, a pixel or a sound.

With billions of online videos to draw from, Generative AI programs can create scenes showing anything in a matter of seconds. All they require is a text prompt to describe what the user is looking for. It has led to a torrent of fantasy videos showing everything from Elvis Presley in Star Wars to characters from Harry Potter rapping in full wizard’s regalia. Many of the clips are difficult to distinguish from reality even though they are entirely artificial.

In contrast, machine learning is a different form of AI which analyzes information to produce data, summaries or instructions. Many companies in the entertainment industry already use this to streamline their processes and optimize their workflows. For example, Disney uses AI-driven analytics to monitor crowds in its theme parks and predict peak traffic areas. Its Disney+ streaming platform also offers personalized recommendations based on AI analysis of usage patterns.

In these examples, AI is used as a tool to analyze existing data rather than to generate new content as is the case with Generative AI. The latter is why it has cast a dark spell on the movie industry and its influence is only growing.

AI talent studio Xicoia recently unveiled its first creation, an entirely photorealistic AI actress called Tilly Norwood. Talent agencies are reportedly circling the digital thespian and not just because it is the first of its kind. All it takes is the push of a button to give the character a different hair color, skin color, eyes or accent. There’s no need for any makeup or training giving it extreme versatility at a low cost.

There’s no doubt that it’s eerie but it seems to be the way of the future given the vast sums that are being invested in AI. For obvious reasons, actors are up in arms with Mary Poppins star Emily Blunt recently saying “good Lord, we’re screwed” when she was shown a news report about Norwood. “That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”

It reflects the backlash that Disney faced when its Marvel Studios division used Generative AI to create the opening to its 2023 Disney+ super hero show Secret Invasion. The sequence featured designs which looked like transforming watercolor renderings of the show’s stars, such as Samuel L. Jackson, and was inspired by the story’s shape-shifting antagonists, the Skrulls.

Jeff Simpson, who worked with the visual development team on Secret Invasion, posted on X that he was “devastated, I believe AI to be unethical, dangerous and designed solely to eliminate artists’ careers.” In another post, storyboard artist Jon Lam referred to the industrial action by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and described the use of AI as “salt in the wounds of all Artists and Writers in the WGA strike”.

The Mouse That Roared

Disney quickly learned its lesson and has has since used every trick in its spell book to try and stop its copyrighted characters from being used in AI programs. Just a few weeks ago it reportedly sent a cease and desist letter to Character.AI warning the startup to stop using its Intellectual Property (IP) without authorization in interactive chatbots.

Character.AI said it had complied by removing the characters and added that “it’s always up to rightsholders to decide how people may interact with their IP.” Others haven’t given in so easily.

Disney also recently took legal action against AI image creator Midjourney, claiming that the company improperly used and distributed AI-generated characters from its movies. Midjourney can be used to create images with written prompts, and Disney believes it used characters like Darth Vader and Deadpool to train its system without getting its permission. Disney said its takedown notices had been ignored and Midjourney hasn’t responded to the lawsuit.

Disney isn’t alone in its disdain of Generative AI but it may be too late to stop its assault on the entertainment industry as it appears the genie is out of the bottle. Studios’ contend that AI systems are not allowed to produce videos with characters that resemble their own. Perhaps mindful of this, Sam Altman, boss of Generative AI giant OpenAI, recently confirmed that his platform will give rightsholders more control over characters and added that although its model was trained on their IP, they will be able to block the technology from reproducing their characters.

However, the whole benefit of AI is that it learns. So the question is how many differences do there have to be for an artificial creation to be considered dissimilar to a copyrighted character or an actual celebrity? It is no less difficult a question to answer than asking when a ‘heap’ becomes a ‘pile’.

Furthermore, the nature of the internet is such that copycats spring up faster than they can be stopped so even if one AI platform complies with movie studios, another is waiting in the wings to frustrate them. It’s the same never-ending game of whack-a-mole that has plagued studios in their battle against piracy which has surged since movie catalogs hit streaming platforms.

It explains why AI movies aplenty featuring Robert Downey Jr. can be found on YouTube despite the actor saying that not only does he disapprove of studios using his likeness in so-called AI deepfakes but they will be subject to legal action even after his passing as his “law firm will still be very active.”

It remains to be seen whether studios will prevail in their lawsuits as the AI companies believe they can train their models without any copyright issues.

Perhaps hedging their bets, some studios have begun to open their arms to AI provided that it is on their terms. Even Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger announced during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in March that it will only use AI if “our IP is being protected…Second, that our creators are being respected, and last, that our customers are being considered and valued, particularly as this technology emerges rapidly.”

Since then, Bloomberg has reported that Disney is exploring potential deals with AI companies, including OpenAI. Given how fast its program is being adopted, studios may have no choice but to collaborate with it.

On Friday OpenAI said that the latest version of its text-to-video tool Sora had been downloaded more than a million times in less than five days. It has resulted in a deluge of videos on social media, some even featuring deceased celebrities. Just a few days ago, Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams, asked people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father which she described as “recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed.” Despite her pleas, there is plenty of appetite for fake footage.

When alleged concept art for Marvel’s upcoming super hero team up movie Avengers: Doomsday leaked earlier this year, AI-generated footage based on it soon spread like wildfire on YouTube garnering hundreds of thousands of views. The initial videos were almost movie quality and the results are improving every day, again thanks to the learning power of AI.

Studios perhaps need to consider that in future there will be no need for fans to wait for movies to be released as they will be able to create them on their own using text prompts, comics or concept art. Instead of fighting AI, it might turn out to be more productive to fully adopt it or completely overhaul their business models to act faster than the software. They seem to be doing the opposite.

James Gunn’s Magic Formula

An insight into a missed opportunity for studios to outmaneuver AI came earlier this week courtesy of James Gunn, probably the most forward-thinking director in Hollywood.

Gunn began his career as a screen-writer at independent studio Troma but got his big break with Marvel at the helm of the Guardians of the Galaxy series. Gunn’s magic formula turned the obscure characters into a multi-billion dollar franchise for Marvel.

Most sci-fi films are replete with plot holes but no stone is left unturned in the tight and snappy Guardians scripts. Then there’s the characters which are far from generic spacemen. The team includes a walking and talking tree, an anthropomorphic raccoon, a brooding muscle-bound bruiser, an aloof female warrior and a human who is a fish out of water. The movies take them seriously but never in a self-indulgent or overly reverent way.

The key to this is that each character represents distinct and familiar personality types that anyone can relate to. This draws viewers into the story so much that by the end of the movies you forget that most of the team are aliens. Music is cleverly used to drive the plot forward and lure in older viewers as the human hero was abducted by aliens in the 1980s with his only connection to earth being a Walkman.

The films are filled with disco classics like ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ by Marvin Gaye and the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ which gives even more for an adult audience to relate to. Adding to the atmosphere, the action takes place against a psychedelic backdrop which evokes imagery made famous by legendary British sci-fi artist Angus McKie in the pages of 1980s fantasy magazine Heavy Metal.

It all paid off as the three Guardians movies grossed a total of $2.5 billion with the latest instalment becoming Disney’s fourth highest-grossing Marvel movie since the pandemic. It narrowly lost out to Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever as well as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Deadpool & Wolverine, which captivated audiences with its dimension hopping into different super hero universes.

Given the far-fetched subject matter, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies could have easily been busts if it hadn’t been for Gunn’s care and attention.

This success put him on the radar of Warner Bros. and it appointed him and his producing partner Peter Safran as the co-heads of its DC Comics super hero studio. His work for DC kicked off in 2021 with the acclaimed Suicide Squad movie which spawned the HBO Max spinoff streaming series Peacemaker, starring John Cena in the title role.

Peacemaker’s second season featured its own dimension hopping high jinks with quantum doorways and ended with a bang earlier this week. However, perhaps the biggest shock came when Gunn revealed afterwards that he tried to arrange a cameo from Deadpool in the finale. “I wanted them to open the door and see Deadpool in a room,” said Gunn. “And I talked to Ryan Reynolds about it, but I think we would’ve had to go through some pretty big hoops to do that. He wanted to do it.”

In the end, the only reference to Marvel came in a mention of Spider-Man which suggested that the wall crawler is a fictional superhero in the DC universe. It was a nice nod but didn’t have anywhere near the impact that a cameo from Deadpool would have had.

A Marvellous Team-Up

Marvel and DC have crossed over in the comics, including a series this year featuring a battle between Deadpool and Batman and another run in the 1990s which coincidentally had artwork by McKie as can be seen here. However, Marvel and DC characters have never teamed up on screen before.

The Deadpool cameo would have generated excitement about the possibility of team up movies between both studios and this marketing muscle is exactly what they need. Before the pandemic, Marvel was a darling of the box office with its Avengers: Endgame movie becoming the highest-grossing movie in history when it made $2.8 billion in 2019.

Times have changed since then and many of Marvel’s recent films have been pilloried. This year alone both of the movies released by the studio underperformed despite having high praise from the studio’s management.

Ahead of the launch of Thunderbolts, Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger said he felt “very good” about the movie while Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige described The Fantastic Four: First Steps as “a no-homework-required movie.” However, the former grossed just $382.4 million with the latter earning $521.8 million. The biggest super hero movie of the year was Gunn’s Superman but even that grossed $54.2 million less than its 2013 predecessor, Man of Steel.

That’s partly due to the rise in streaming which gives viewers more choice of movies than ever before. Generative AI takes that flexibility to a new level as it allows users to create their own movies. If they want to see Deadpool debut in Peacemaker they can create scenes of it in a matter of seconds. Kudos to Gunn for trying to make this happen on screen but his creative vision was held up by the studios’ bureaucracy and that opens the door for Generative AI videos of it.

If Generative AI is used strategically by movie studios there would be less incentive for fans to do it themselves. This doesn’t necessarily mean any jobs would be lost. On the contrary, it could create a new category of employment in the entertainment industry.

When James Cameron unveiled the first partially computer-generated main character in a mainstream blockbuster in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the industry could have decried it as a step towards the end of physical actors. Instead it was a hailed as a technological breakthrough and the film won the Academy Award for the Best Visual Effects.

True, actor Robert Patrick was still required to do motion capture for the scenes where his character was transformed into a liquid metal robot but Generative AI requires programmers too. It seems all but certain that they will play a starring role in the future of Hollywood but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s the final act for physical actors.

Similarly, the advent of streaming caused critics to claim that it would spell the end for movie theaters but they are still going despite the damage done by the pandemic. As former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner told this author in an interview for the Daily Mail in 2023, “the motion picture experience inside a communal space is not going away.

“When television came in, everybody thought radio was going to go the way of the dinosaur and they all thought movies in theaters were going to fall off a cliff. In the 1930s, 80 million Americans went to the movies once a week and there were only 135 million people in the USA at that time. Today, it is still big business and it is finding its way in the era of streaming. But the movie business is still there.”

Generative AI is just the latest form of technology in the entertainment industry and studios have little choice but to embrace it or risk getting left behind when their competitors do this. To paraphrase a line from the Avengers’ arch-antagonist Thanos, Hollywood caliber AI movies are inevitable and they are coming soon.