On the menu today: Whether you generally love or hate the movies and television produced by Hollywood, we’re witnessing a fascinating dispute between the creators and the studios, as new technologies upend the traditional process of making and distributing movies and television shows — or what studio heads unnervingly keep calling “content.” People have fun with ChatGPT and OpenArtAI, but what happens when a major movie or television studio starts wondering if it can replace the screenwriters and actors with some artificial substitute?
Artificial Intelligence Comes to Hollywood, and the Creative Class Goes on Strike
Americans usually think of Hollywood as being awash in money. We’re constantly told how many millions this movie made at the box office on its opening weekend, and for the big pop-culture franchises, we see the ubiquitous merchandising in stores and online. People strut down the street as walking billboards for their favorite movie characters and shows, kids play with the toy action figures, and the soundtracks get downloaded on Apple Music.
So, if there’s all this money around . . . why are Hollywood’s actors joining its writers in going on strike?
This morning, roughly 60,000 television and movie actors, stunt men, and voice-over artists went on strike, joining the roughly 11,500 screenwriters who have been off work since May. As our Ari Blaff notes, it is the first time since 1960 that both actors and writers have banded together in a historic double strike.
Part of the dispute is how the fortune from all those movie tickets and streaming-subscription fees gets divvied up. The actors contend that the residual payments aren’t keeping up with the money the studios are making from their global audiences.
But the shift to streaming has altered the most common production schedules, in a town where almost every creative job is temporary. In the era of streaming services, the traditional schedule of a 22-episode television season has been replaced with lots of shows that run six-, eight-, or ten-episode seasons. That adds up to a lot more shorter-term gigs and fewer year-round gigs.
Rob Long, the NR columnist and occasional Three Martini Lunch guest host, is among the television writers on the picket line. Over in Commentary, Rob laid out the perspective of the writers in his trademark hilarious tone, while noting that studio fat-cats are feeling more financial pressure and anxiety from the ongoing technological changes:
Since that deal was struck, writers have become convinced — not without justification — that current business practices are pricing them out of the industry. In some ways, this is a great time to be a Hollywood writer: more buyers in the marketplace, more scripted entertainment, more work for more writers. But now writers are being asked to sign longer-term contracts for less money. They — we — are feeling financially stretched and abused by a system that keeps them locked into exclusive contracts without compensation.
The producers are in the midst of their own financial crisis. Since the last deal, the once high-flying Netflix has suffered contractions in its subscriber base, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have shuttered departments and consolidated operations, Disney has fired and replaced its top leadership, and every executive in town keeps nervously checking email for an official-looking message from Human Resources that begins, “As you know, the entertainment business is in the midst of fundamental change, and unfortunately that change means that we must eliminate the position you currently occupy. . . .”
But perhaps the more intriguing aspect of these ongoing disputes is the fear throughout Hollywood’s creative class that artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, could do their jobs cheaper and easier, if not better.
In one high-profile example, artificial intelligence already arrived in Hollywood, in the form of the opening credits for Marvel’s latest show on Disney+, Secret Invasion. The show imagines an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style story of the Skrulls, shapeshifting aliens infiltrating human institutions and plotting global conquest, and the creators wanted an opening credit sequence that looked strange, disconcerting, and paranoia-inducing to help set the tone. They went with AI:
As we see a sort of jittery and ominous sequence of the Skrull green taking over more and more of the world, it looks a lot like if an AI was prompted with the concept of “Skrull cubism” — which, actually, isn’t that far off of what it is. As director and executive producer Ali Selim tells Polygon, the intro sequence was designed by Method Studios using artificial intelligence, something he thinks plays with the very themes of the show.
“When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it — it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?” Selim says.
The use of AI in the opening credits likely played with the themes of the show a little too well, as a lot of digital-effects artists publicly ripped into Marvel for using artificial intelligence to create programming, at the exact time that Hollywood writers are on strike, demanding an assurance that they will never be replaced or even supplemented with AI. The studio that created the opening sequence for Marvel later issued a statement clarifying that AI was only one of the tools it used, and that AI was not coming for animators’ jobs:
Now Method Studios, which is behind the opening, wants to clarify those reports surrounding how AI was used in the animated open made by its design division: “AI is just one tool among the array of tool sets our artists used. No artists’ jobs were replaced by incorporating these new tools; instead, they complemented and assisted our creative teams,” reads a statement from Method to The Hollywood Reporter.
As for the actors, you can understand their wariness as we see not just de-aged versions of actors on the screen, but long-deceased actors come back to life through computer graphics — most notably Peter Cushing in the Star Wars film Rogue One and Christopher Reeve for a brief scene in The Flash. Once a studio has sufficient data to make a realistic moving image of an actor . . . how much do they need the original actor anymore? At some point, would some particularly obsessive director — picture the next Stanley Kubrick — decide that artificial AI-generated actors are easier, because they always do exactly what they’re programmed to do? No more disputes about nude scenes or any other actions a live performer might be reluctant to do.
At what point does a programmable, completely controllable AI version of an actor become more cost-effective than a real flesh-and-blood one?
Fascinatingly, the star of Secret Invasion, Samuel L. Jackson, said in a recent interview that he insists in his contract language that his image cannot be used or reused in films after he’s passed:
The SAG strike is looming as well. Tom Hanks recently discussed his fears about AI, and how the studios may produce work featuring you after you’ve passed.
People just started worrying about that? I asked about that a long time ago. The first time I got scanned for George Lucas [for The Phantom Menace] I was like, “What’s this for?” George and I are good friends so we kind of had a laugh about it because I thought he was doing it because he had all those old guys in Episode I, and if something happened to them, he still wanted to put ‘em in the movie. Ever since I’ve been in the Marvel Universe, every time you change costumes in a Marvel movie, they scan you. Ever since I did Captain Marvel, and they did the Lola project where they de-aged me and everything else, it’s like, “Well, I guess they can do this anytime they want to do it if they really want to!” It could be something to worry about. Future actors should do what I always do when I get a contract and it has the words “in perpetuity” and “known and unknown” on it: I cross that s*** out. It’s my way of saying, “No, I do not approve of this.”
Samuel L. Jackson has the leverage to insist upon crossing those terms out of his contract. But will a lesser-known actor, looking for a big break, walk away from an opportunity over that? Probably not.
Fran Drescher, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, warned yesterday, “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be replaced by machines and big business.”
If Hollywood’s creative class could undo the industry-wide embrace of streaming services, it probably would. After the surprising success of Netflix last decade, a lot of giant entertainment corporations envisioned adopting that model, imagining that the subscription fees from a service such as Disney+ would make up for a lack of advertising revenue. That hasn’t worked out; earlier this year, an influential team of Wall Street analysts concluded, “Investors and executives have accepted that streaming is, in fact, not a good business — at least not compared to what came before . . . we find ourselves hurtling towards a climax where once-great companies will have to face the reality that they can no longer afford to light money on fire chasing profits that do not exist.” The consulting firm Deloitte came to a similar conclusion:
The Deloitte report then warned: “Streaming has also disrupted profitability. Gone are the revenues enjoyed during the cable TV era, which formerly approached those of the global energy sector; by some estimates, streaming generates one-sixth as much revenue per home as pay TV.” In addition, “audiences are fragmented, canceling subscriptions is easy, and advertising has yet to unlock revenues. Content has only become more expensive to acquire and produce.”
At one point, the appeal of Netflix was that it offered so much programming for one relatively low monthly fee. I notice that some of Netflix’s most popular programming now is broadcast shows from years ago — particularly The Office and Friends. There are no production costs involved in those programs, and they represent hundreds of hours of content — 201 episodes of The Office and 236 episodes of Friends. Other entertainment companies realized Netflix was making a ton off old programming, and so NBC created Peacock, Warner Brothers created HBOMax (now just “Max”), Disney created Disney+, and so on.
A portion of the profitability of streaming services was the ability to turn old television shows into a service for which people would pay about ten bucks a month. Now, the streaming services are competing on the creation of new shows, which costs a lot more money — particularly if you’re hiring big stars or creating special-effects-heavy stories such as those in Marvel and Star Wars, or Netflix’s Stranger Things.
If you want something valuable, you must pay for it. It’s probably easier to finance a big-budget, action-packed, on-location-shooting and special-effects-heavy story with ticket sales in summertime, than through the usual monthly subscription fee.
Oh, and is “get woke, go broke” a factor in all this? Sure. A lot of heavy-handed political passion projects could be financed by the revenues of a big, apolitical summer blockbuster. Inject politics, ideology, or some ham-fisted metaphor or message into the moneymaking franchises, and a portion of your audience is likely to stay home from the theater or skip past it on the streaming service. And when those big-budget blockbusters don’t make a fortune, you don’t have the money to make the $20 million Oscar-bait movie about a disabled veteran abortionist who finds love while overcoming addiction and battling a polluting evangelical Christian corporate CEO.
Dinner with Friends
A message from our friends at the National Review Institute:
National Review Institute’s Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program is accepting applications for the fall in Chicago and Dallas. Burke to Buckley is intended for mid-career professionals from a wide variety of professions and industries. Over eight sessions, a small cohort gathers to engage in discussions of first principles and their application to current issues. Experts from academia and National Review serve as moderators for each session. To find more information and to apply, click here. Applications close this Saturday, July 15.
Also, the deadline for National Review’s student essay contest is coming up at the end of the month!
National Review Institute’s Buckley Essay Contest is accepting applications until July 31. The essay contest is open to currently enrolled students who will be in their sophomore or junior year in the fall. The essays should be between 1,500 and 2,000 words and respond to the following prompt: One of the principal tasks of Reagan-Buckley conservatism was to bring government back under the control of the Constitution — a task pursued through judicial appointments but also legislation and popular education. How well has this project succeeded, and where is it falling short? The winning essay will be published on NationalReview.com.
Email buckleyessay@nrinstitute.org with any questions or to submit an essay. If you know a student who might be interested, please consider passing this along!
ADDENDUM: Go figure, after White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly assured the country that the president and the administration had complete faith in the Secret Service’s ability to investigate the cocaine found in the White House . . . “the Secret Service has concluded its investigation into the small bag of cocaine found at the White House and has been unable to identify a suspect.”
The U.S. Secret Service is in charge of protecting and investigating any crimes at one of the most secure sites in the world. And it found nothing.
I suppose, depending upon your perspective, you could argue the Secret Service did its job.