The Rest Is Entertainment on Youtube recently released an episode with a take on How AI Will Take Over Hollywood In The Next 10 Years.
Hosts Marina Hyde and Richard Osman “pull back the curtain on television, film, journalism and more using their years of knowledge, enviable contact book and wit to bring what’s hot and what’s not in the world of entertainment.”
The episode has them reacting to the first Sora announcement and AI in general. This exchange is particularly insightful:
RO: “…that entire middle of the industry which is where everyone I’ve, you know, worked with my whole life works, you know, it’s going to be really, really tough times I think and there’s no safety net put in place but it’s the middle of culture that will disappear and be replaced by AI I suspect and it’s coming soon and it’ll come sooner.”
MH: “As always the middle in everything is going in the way that mid budget films have fallen away and that kind of middle bankable quality stuff has gone and at the moment I cannot see a pathway to it coming back.”
Richard also says:
“If you’re a new creator in the industry, if you’re a new brain (and by the way it’s quite hard to get into the industry) and you have these tools at your disposal, you would just be using them. I remember a very, very young Edgar Wright when he was starting out and him and his friends would just make these little home movies on videos because that was a new technology that they could suddenly use. If you’re a young person now, a young writer, young creator, young director, a young actor, why would you not be using these AI tools to make incredible content and sharing it with people?”
My take: These comments echo what Jerry Seinfeld recently said about the movie business in general being over. I foresee a continued splintering of audiences into smaller and smaller niches, necessitating smaller budgets as profits also become smaller. Every once in a while something will break through into the general Big C Culture but for the most part that will be left to deep-pocketed streamers chasing smaller and smaller mass audiences. As Seth Godin says: