How will AI change Hollywood? From Tom Cruise stunts to digital doubles

Hello, this is Sherpa Robotics. Today we have translated for you an article about the struggle for jobs in Hollywood amid the introduction of artificial intelligence in film production. But is the opportunity to create your own film with the help of AI so terrible for any ordinary person? Without millions of dollars of investment, without titled actors and hundreds of extras. Hollywood got scared. How justified is this fear? The authors of the article cite the history of cinema as an example to answer this question.

Tom Cruise is perhaps the most analogue star in Hollywood. He reportedly once flew into a rage when a crew member suggested performing a dangerous stunt with a digital double, exclaiming, “No digital Tom! Only Tom!”

For Mission: Impossible – Deadly Case – Part One, Cruise, who was 61 at the time of the film's release, personally jumped a motorcycle from a ski jump on top of a mountain, let the motorcycle fall into a canyon, and then parachuted into a valley. The complex scene took a year of planning and filming. Most likely, it cost a lot of money. Some computer effects were used, including digitally transforming a jump into a rocky section of a mountain. But there was no digital Tom. Like many of Hollywood's top stars, Cruise has spent much of his career battling digital intrusions into Hollywood processes, especially ones that could replace real people. So it's no surprise that the film pits superspy Ethan Hunt against a pervasive artificial intelligence known as “The Entity.” This enemy, as described in the film, is “everywhere and nowhere,” with access to every digital system and, in the process, “undermining the very truth as we know it.” It was an apt metaphor for Hollywood's own painful struggle with AI.

While the film was being released in theaters, the Hollywood Actors' and Writers' Guilds were on strike. Guilds worried about the usual issues: pay, benefits, contract transparency and job requirements. But most of all, they were worried about their jobs, as they were afraid that they would become useless due to generative AI.

“We want to be able to scan a background actor's image, pay him for half a day's work, and then use his image for any purpose forever without his consent,” is how the Screen Actors Guild of America described the Producers Guild of America's position.

“We also want to be able to make changes to main actors' lines and even create new scenes without their consent. And we want to be able to use images, images and performances of people to train new generative AI systems without consent or compensation.”

The Writers Guild of America has worried that screenwriters may be forced to write drafts based on AI notes, respond to AI comments, or find their own original work rewritten and rearranged by AI software. In other words, no one wants to work for a robot and no one would like to be replaced by one.

The industry was united in its opposition to digital Volumes. But working with a robot? It was a slightly different story. As it turns out, AI tools, even in their infancy, are already quite useful assistants, especially for the task of organizing the “big picture.” Creating a story arc can be as important a part of writing a script as writing the specific lines that make up the scenes.

Screenplay structure is a complex art in its own right. So when the Writers Guild reached an agreement to end the strike, its contract included provisions allowing screenwriters to use AI to assist in their work, although no AI could be listed in the credits.

Before the robots rise, they will be partners, making the work of creative workers easier and more efficient.

You can tell a lot about an industry by what it fears. For decades, Hollywood stars have been spinning horror stories about the dangers of artificial intelligence. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Westworld, from The Terminator to The Matrix, intelligent machines have been cast as villains – inhuman and emotionless, inexorable and powerful, messengers of death and destruction. Hollywood's AI antagonists are murderous deities and gods of the technological apocalypse. They are not assistants or tools, but powerful alien minds indifferent to ordinary human suffering – not like some film studio executives, as one might assume. Now these fears have moved into the real world.

Both strikes came after high-profile breakthroughs in generative AI, with programs like Midjourney demonstrating their ability to create impressively vivid and sometimes life-like images from simple text queries, and AI chatbots like ChatGPT showing that A.I. can produce high-quality written products such as essays. Both writers and actors began to fear that they would be forced to work with AI tools – or, worse, that they would be replaced entirely.

A star like Cruise might argue that there would be no digital Tom, but ordinary Hollywood workers were worried that the real “Entity” might come after their jobs and no Hollywood hero would save them. In many ways they were – and remain – right. AI threatens to turn almost every aspect of filmmaking on its head, not just writing but acting as well.

Animation, special effects, makeup, costumes, lighting, photography, as well as set design and production design will probably all inevitably undergo some kind of change. Already, generative AI tools enable even ordinary people without special training to create and manipulate high-quality audio and video. But therein lies the opportunity.

AI could wreak havoc on traditional film production with its huge budgets and complex technical requirements. But in the process, it is likely to make high-quality film production much less expensive and logistically labor intensive, enabling smaller, more flexible and less traditional productions created by individuals or small companies with few or no connections to the global film system.

Making a film is an absurd, preposterous and almost comically expensive endeavor. Blockbusters regularly cost between $200 and $300 million to produce, and marketing costs for big films can even exceed this figure. The production of Mission: Impossible – Deadly Case – Part One alone cost $291 million.

Smaller productions are also expensive. A film with a modest budget can still cost millions of dollars to produce. Some episodes of TV shows can exceed $20 million, even without Cruise and his motorcycles.

The high cost of production makes the film business extremely, almost irresponsibly risky for both creatives and film industry executives. This affects the industry's output. The pressure to earn more than half a billion dollars in global box office receipts has made most of Hollywood's films focused on a few sure-fire genres and categories, such as family-friendly animated films and superhero films.

Where does all this money go? For wages. Watch the closing credits of even the smallest movie and you'll likely see dozens of names. The largest productions are huge enterprises with thousands of artists, technicians and other specialists. Each name that runs across the screen represents a salary added to the budget.

One of the biggest expenses of modern films and TV series is the work on creating computer graphics. The budgets for individual episodes of She-Hulk, Marvel's Disney+ series, skyrocketed during production, reaching $25 million per episode. It's larger than the finale of HBO's epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, in large part because of the cost of digital effects used to create the titular character, who is bright green and nearly 7 feet tall.

More subtle special effects are now part of many films. Actors in more realistic films now regularly appear “rejuvenated” using subtle but expensive digital effects. Virtual production, in which scenes are filmed on sets built from walls of high-definition LED panels, allows filmmakers to shoot films in virtually any environment without building physical sets or traveling to the set. This method of filming gives filmmakers flexibility, but these rigs are expensive to build and maintain. What if the cost of virtual production drops dramatically? What if scenery, locations and backgrounds could be easily generated at home on desktop computers using simple text queries? And what if, at the same time, digital effects and makeup, like the one used to create She-Hulk or de-aging actors, became just as accessible?

This is exactly what AI tools promise for the filmmaking of the future. In November 2023, Jeffrey Katzenberg, a longtime studio executive who oversaw some of Disney's most artistically and commercially successful animated film releases in the 1990s, predicted that AI would reshape every aspect of the industry, especially animated films.

“I don't know of any industry that will be more affected than media,” Katzenberg said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.

“In the good old days, you might need 500 artists and years to create a world-class cartoon. I don't think in three years it will take 10 percent of that.” According to Katzenberg, it's not just that a Pixar film with a $200 million budget can become a film with a $20 million budget. The high degree of importance of animation and special effects in modern filmmaking means that many more processes in the film industry can be affected by change. Instead of going over budget, the next She-Hulk could be made for comparative pennies. Just a few months after Katzenberg's prediction, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and arguably the leader in generative AI technology, announced Sora, a program that can generate incredibly colorful computer animations from simple text queries. Image quality varied, with some scenes looking almost photorealistic and others decidedly more clunky. But by mid-March, Bloomberg reported, OpenAI had met with Hollywood players about using the software, and some filmmakers were experimenting with its capabilities. This was just the initial release. Subsequent generations will almost certainly become more and more advanced. Many of the effects looked better than the expensive, crude effects showcased in She-Hulk.

The old, time-consuming, expensive methods of filmmaking—whether virtual or physical—are becoming a thing of the past.

Days after Sora's debut, Tyler Perry, the actor, screenwriter, director and independent movie mogul who now owns a large film studio in Atlanta, announced that he was canceling construction of an $800 million studio, citing what he had seen from Sora. “I've been hearing for a year or two that this was coming, but I had no idea until I recently saw demos of what it could do,” Perry told The Hollywood Reporter. “This shocks me.” What exactly was so shocking? “I won’t have to travel to different places anymore,” he explained. “If I want to be in the snow in Colorado, that's text. If I want to write a scene on the moon, that's text, and this AI can generate it out of thin air. If I want two people to be in a living room in the mountains, I don't have to build scenery in the mountains, I don’t have to set up the scenery on my site. I can sit in the office and do it from the computer.”

Perry was clearly depressed about the future of his industry. “I'm very concerned that a lot of jobs are going to be lost in the near future,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “There must be some rules to protect us,” he added separately. “If not, I just don't know how we'll survive.”

Imagine for a moment his statement: “I can sit in the office and do this from the computer.” Perry's breakthrough in Hollywood and his influence were partly the result of individual creative successes, particularly his Medea films, which were aimed at black audiences who were underserved, ignored or disdained by mainstream Hollywood studios. But these films also succeeded thanks to smart cost-cutting. Perry's filmography is filled with films made quickly and on relatively small budgets. By making films on the cheap, Perry dramatically reduced the risk of filmmaking, especially for first-time filmmakers without established Hollywood status. Perry's worry is that AI will do something similar to what he did – but even more powerful.

The history of Hollywood is a history of great visions and clashing egos, a history of storytelling and marketing triumphs, a history of small-budget hits and great big-budget flops. It is also a history of technological evolution and business revolutions. From the advent of sound to color, from computer graphics to digital photography and immersive sound effects, filmmakers have always found ways to make advances in technology work for them. On the business side, shifts in distribution, marketing and financing helped keep the risky business of filmmaking afloat.

Peter Biskind's 2004 book about the independent film renaissance of the 1990s, Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, begins with a quote from one of the era's leading boom figures, Quentin Tarantino: “In the '80s, studios could predict that what would work and what wouldn't. And it was one movie after another that you had already seen, and suddenly it stopped working…”

The independent film boom that reshaped Hollywood in the 1990s began with director Steven Soderbergh's 1989 debut of Sex, Lies and Videotape at the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance was a sleepy gathering that favored decent but dull stories about regional America; even the most successful ones were rarely shown in more than two dozen theaters across the country. “Sex, Lies and Videotape” was shown on hundreds of screens, including arthouse-averse suburban multiplexes and shopping malls. It grossed more than $36 million worldwide on a $1.2 million budget and turned the Sundance Film Festival and independent cinema into a goldmine. Soderbergh, meanwhile, became one of the most prolific and most influential filmmakers of his generation. He has occasionally directed traditional star-studded box office hits such as Ocean's Eleven and its immediate sequels. But he also embraced technological change. In 2005, he released The Bubble, a low-budget, almost experimental film released simultaneously in theaters and on digital streaming platforms, making him the first major filmmaker to do so. In 2019, he created High Flying Bird, a film shot entirely on an iPhone and released first as a phone app with interactive elements. Throughout his career, Soderbergh has kept costs under control by serving as his own cinematographer and editor.

When audiences are fed up with the standard stuff and are screaming for something different, that's when exciting things happen in Hollywood. Tarantino was talking about a different era. But something similar to that description applies to post-pandemic Hollywood, as superhero movies that were supposed to be winners flounder and proliferating streaming services struggle to find subscribers. Generative AI, combined with cheap, accessible, mass distribution of online video through platforms like YouTube, could be the “something different” that usheres in the next era.

Entertainment Strategy Guy (ESG), the author of an anonymous newsletter about the business of Hollywood, suggests that AI tools could give birth to a new role, which he calls “creator.” In this future, “people not only write their own scripts, perhaps with the help of AI, and direct and edit, but … also do all the cinematography, special effects and acting, if the technology gets good enough,” he says. It's a world where “everyone has a chance to be their own Soderbergh” and “anyone can create their own masterpiece.” Hollywood, long the domain of large, expensive creative teams, is beginning to resemble the world of book publishing, where solo authors, perhaps working with an editor, are the norm. This is a future that benefits digital creators and independent producers, outsiders with few connections and little money. “I think they see a lot of positives in this because now you can make your own movie, especially if it's animation,” ESG says in a phone interview.

But, he warns, there are risks too. The film industry has already changed dramatically in recent years thanks to advances in digital technology and online distribution. Streaming services such as Netflix and video hosting platforms such as YouTube have weakened Hollywood's previous influence on video entertainment.

His worry is that AI will accelerate this transformation. If, “by the end of the decade, Hollywood stops making $200 million movies because they're all being made online, tens of thousands of jobs will be lost and the disruption will be extremely painful.” While he sees optimistic scenarios, he calls himself an “AI pessimist,” partly because of the disruptive nature of AI and the speed at which it can wipe out entire categories of jobs. He advocates trying to slow the pace of change to make it easier for film industry workers. But, unfortunately, this is no longer possible.

The integration of generative AI into filmmaking will be disruptive. It will lead to big shifts in the nature of employment in the entertainment business. Job losses are bad even in good circumstances, and no one should justify layoffs, especially when they seriously damage an entire industry or sector. However, we've seen mass layoffs in the entertainment sector not too long ago—and sometimes those losses can pave the way for something better.

Unlike the young auteurs who reshaped Hollywood in the 1970s, Quentin Tarantino did not go to film school. Instead, he worked at a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California. Home video was a new technology at the time; before VHS, moviegoers had to catch reruns at local repertory theaters or wait for films to air. Tarantino was already a devoted film buff. But access to a huge VHS video library helped Tarantino and others of his generation acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of film history. Not only was his own film education made possible by new distribution technology, but his films also found an audience thanks to the home video boom, which made films available to more people.

Blockbuster, the largest of the video rental chains, began with one store in Dallas, Texas in 1985. At the store's peak, the chain had more than 9,000 locations in the United States alone and employed 84,000 people worldwide, according to Business Insider. Blockbuster doesn't exist today. Those jobs—hourly positions, some management positions, operational positions—are all gone. With the exception of a handful of nostalgic surviving projects, home video rental as we knew it is gone. But streaming services and digital rental options are making watching movies at home easier and more accessible than ever. Something similar is likely to happen to the rest of Hollywood. The industry's most dire predictions of job losses may not come true, but many of today's film workers are likely to be displaced by AI. For some, this shift will be cause for despair.

Some technologies are replaced by others, and we believe that no one with a smartphone in their hands greatly yearns for a typewriter, fax and pager. With artificial intelligence technologies, everything is similar – it is a tool that speeds up and simplifies processes tenfold, which previously took long hours and significant amounts of money.

Would you like to create your own movie using neural networks?