The AIs are coming for the films. Which humans should worry?

It might not be Marvel-lous

As this is published, it’s Friday May 23, and a new Tom Cruise film—almost surely the last of the Mission: Impossible series—is going on show. It’s been two years since the last one came out, but I’m really quite excited for this one. As much as anything because it’s Tom “Insanity is my middle name” Cruise, who really does do a lot of his own stunts. He hangs on to planes! He climbs the Bhurj Khalifa! He rides motorbikes¹! He drives cars! He leaps tall buildings (sometimes not quite; he broke an ankle on one such stunt)! He drives his motorbike off a cliff into the void with only a parachute, and he does it repeatedly!

OK, he does all this with safety gear to stop him dying (except the motorbike-off-cliff stuff, which relied on the parachute). But we, the audience, know that a lot of what we see is absolutely real. The previous M:I film, Dead Reckoning, took $571m worldwide—which wasn’t quite enough to make a profit, weirdly, given how much it cost to make (about $200m, but then you have to add marketing costs). But the franchise as a whole has taken $4.2bn against production budgets of $1.5bn, and given that marketing usually doubles the production budget, it’s done OK.

A couple of weeks ago, a new Marvel movie opened: Thunderbolts*. I don’t know what the asterisk means, and I had absolutely zero interest in the film. The superhero films are, we all know, total CGI-fests where nothing is particularly real, and there are no actual stakes, and you have to be about 13 years old to find the plot or characters compelling. Green screens are everywhere. The absurdity of the whole project was beautifully sent up in the TV series The Franchise: “Is this a dream factory or a chemical plant?”

That difference makes all the difference. What the box office numbers show is that there have been diminishing returns from the, er, chemical plant. The big blue top line on the graph below is Avengers: Endgame, which, OK, took $2.7bn on a $400m (perhaps) budget when it came out in 2019. That’s respectable.

Since then it’s been pretty mixed. A few of the releases have absolutely bombed (particularly 2023’s The Marvels—budget $270m, box office $191m, which after marketing expenses too must have left a big hole in the studio coffers).

My point here isn’t actually about films, though it sort of is. For a long time I’ve been writing here about how AI is going to change things by generating content that we’ll find compelling, and that human-generated content will be overwhelmed by the AI stuff.

Well, earlier this week Google had its I/O developer conference, at which it announced lots of things it has been working on. One of these is its video generator Google Flow, which will take a prompt and produce, well, whatever you want it to produce.

As they say, the only limit is your imagination. And so people have been using it to show how limited their imaginations are. Have you ever seen something so straightforwardly derivative and mindless?

It was made by a guy called Dave Clark (does he have four friends?) who says “Welcome to a new era of filmmaking”.

To which I respond, well, it looks a lot like the old era, and that adhered very closely to Sturgeon’s Law, which says that 90% of everything is crap. Especially when green screens became such a favoured part of screenplays.

But at the same time I recognise that there is a sufficiently big appetite for “men with guns go around shooting things” and “people wearing Spandex go WHOOSH” that in fact there will be plenty of demand for films which have large amounts of AI-generated content, and nobody who likes those kinds of films will care. Films containing more and more AI slop will get longer and longer, and people will care about them less and less. In the US and UK, scriptwriters and actors will complain about this, but that will simply mean that the films get made in other countries, and then distributed online.

There is a form of this already which I think the AI video will quickly take over: the category of TV ad that our family calls “Euro ads”. These are the adverts which are clearly made to be usable in multiple European countries. When you look closely, they have a strange nowhere-but-everywhere feel: they’re not tied to a location, and when people speak, you get an odd feeling that their lips don’t necessarily match what you’re hearing.

Or else they’re silent. Here’s an example:

Where are those people from? Which country is this set in? All that the advertising agency has to do is change some of the overlays and text, and voilà: an ad that you can broadcast anywhere.

Obviously people in advertising agencies, used to thinking in 30-second bursts, are going to fall on this with delight. The next wave of Euro ads is surely rolling down the pipe.

Film directors are already interested by this technology. Darren Aronofsky, maker of Black Swan and Mother!, has already put together a trailer which mixes real-life action with AI-generated visuals. Take a look:

Even so, where does this leave humans, and the people who used to star in those meaningless but well-paid ads? There is going to be a problem. However! Think of Tom Cruise and the M:I stunts and the contrast with the green-screen Marvels. The real stuff gets a premium. It’s difficult to do, but we know that it’s real because we get to see in all sorts of ways that it’s real. There isn’t going to be behind-the-scenes footage from an AI advert or film. You aren’t going to see any outtakes from the second unit. There is going to be a lot of slop. But the bravado that Tom Cruise has brought to the screen will live on. Because it’s only when you see how insane the real-life stunts are that you appreciate the film itself.

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1. You can be certain it’s a Tom Cruise film if at some point he gets on a motorbike, without a helmet. I don’t care if all the sequences are undercranked; they’re still amazing.