Not even slightly bothered by this. The “industry” has always looked for ways to minimize production costs while optimizing profits. They are in the volatile high risk business of selling art for profit.
What successful studios understand is you have to take the losses with the wins, take risks and champion new artists. Placing trust in the artists to know what will be profitable.
The studios that rely on gimmicks, regurgitating old ideas and building projects like they are in the toilet paper business are the ones that die. Lionsgate is simply signaling that it doesn’t know what it’s doing and will pivot or die.
The art of filmmaking only works with human hands, there is no amount of 3D,4D, IMAX, recliner seat CGI in your face AI that will replace it. They are selling bespoke handcrafted free range storytelling. The second the audience smells preservatives, Lionsgate will be filing for Ch11.
I’m worried the studios might be too big to fail. Or rather, too big to fail fast enough not to have the fallout of their loathsome ideas screw all of us over.
They don’t make non-“smart” TVs anymore and that’s not because nobody objected.
What are you gonna do when the other major studios follow suit, adding that sweet sweet AI aspartame in their franchise schlock? Not go and see Batman vs. Darth Vader 3: The Rebackening? Watch an indie movie instead? Don’t make me laugh. Your friends are already depicting you as a soyjack who insists on watching foreign 6-hour black-and-white silent films about communism.
I can’t say I know what Liongate’s plan is, precisely, but I think you’re hitting this on the head.
Remember. Most corporate strategy could be summarized as persuading investors for more debt. It doesn’t really tell the whole story of what is or will happen, only what needs to be said loudly in a room full of fools holding the money bags.
seeing overpaid movie stars get replaced by ai will be fun.
Most them have protections in place preventing use of their likeness. Directors and other high level professionals will probably have enough money to sue anything that comes out of Runway. It’s the artists, vfx, wardrobe, etc (i.e. low level people) that are going to get fucked. None of the savings will be passed to consumers and we will get derivative or rehashed works as a result. Only hope is that the money propping these AI replacements dries up because the studios can’t attract movie goers with the even more unoriginal shit they will try to push.
Yeah this isn’t the plan.
The plan is to get the stars in for a couple of days in front of a green screen, have them say their lines, then use “AI” to generate the rest of the scene. You want to get rid of all the labor around scouting sets, getting permits, constructing them, lighting them, feeding the crew etc. That’s where a big part of the cost of making a movie lies.
The Hollywood bankruptcy auctions in a few years are gonna be lit
Lionsgate hopes to save “millions and millions” replacing all those tawdry storyboard artists and visual effects crew with “cutting-edge, capital-efficient content creation opportunities,” said vice chairman Michael Burns.
that sounds entirely unfit for human consumption. I can’t wait for Saw XV: Capital-Efficient Content Creation Opportunity! pump that melty-faced banal nonsense straight into my consumer veins!
“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.”
Ah yes, the enshittening continues