Intro for May 31, 2024

Dear Gossips,

I promise one day we will get through an entire week without talking about AI but the movie people won’t stop talking about it, which means we have to, as well. 

The latest is from Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra, who told investors in Japan that at Sony they are “very focused on AI”, particularly how to use it to streamline the filmmaking process, which is already happening and already costing real humans jobs. Every time I write about this topic, some Darren emails me and shouts about “the future” as if there are no consequences to displacing people from jobs with nowhere to find new work. I would be all for the AI revolution if we had universal basic income, universal healthcare, and universal housing rights, but we don’t. People need jobs for that stuff. 

Anyway, Tony Vinciquerra isn’t an idiot, but at the same time, he sounds exactly like Ryan Kavanaugh did two decades ago, coming to Hollywood and promising to beat the system with algorithms. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. Business dudes are always trying to figure out how to remove the risk from the movie industry, but it’s an inherently risky business. It’s basically like owning a racehorse: you pump a lot of money into a frivolous beast that mostly just produces pounds of sh-t, but every once in a while, it’ll win a race. 

AI WILL be integrated into production workflows—it’s already happening in animation, VFX, and development elements such as concept art—but trying to use a computer to guess what movies should be made will only result in bad movies. Developing new projects is an alchemical combination of taste and guts, if you use a computer to do it for you, we will only end up with even more homogenous films, and even without computers telling executives what to do, American cinema has become depressingly homogenous, and that’s where this is going. I think they learned from Ryan Kavanaugh not to say that part out loud, but for sure some C-suite dork is asking Jeeves right now what movies families in Omaha want to see so he can decide what scripts to greenlight. Welcome to the future, thanks, I hate it.

In brighter news, yesterday Lainey and her co-hosts on The Social won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Host, Lifestyle. Congrats, Lainey!

Live long and gossip,

Sarah