AI vs IP

Hollywood has come to be ruled by intellectual property or IP. It’s why much of the summer fare at the movie theater (and increasingly non-summer fare) consists of $500 million live action cartoons based around established intellectual properties.

It’s also why people increasingly don’t go to movie theaters. And why what’s left of the visual entertainment industry is in a downward spiral concentrated around whether Disney, Netflix or Amazon will be able to beat more franchises to death. (Paramount is gamely trying, but it’s only got one franchise to wokeify and beat to death with a trans hammer.)

The problem is that the red lights have been flashing. The Disney Marvel movies that had made it incredibly wealthy and powerful aren’t performing as well as they used to. Disney is still minting money but its reliable performers aren’t anymore.

And then there’s AI.

The notion that AI tools could be used to make movies for a fraction of the cost while dispensing with actors, unionized crews and Hollywood account has mostly been empty speculation. AI animation is fine at doing what Meta, Open and Google really want it to do, generate novelty short clips to be shared on social media, but it’s been a long way from replacing movies.

But maybe not.

Whatever your feelings about Star Wars, this is cinematic. It’s not a movie, but it’s a building block of a movie that uses traditional cinematic techniques created with AI generative models. That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s really more than anyone has done before with a traditional live action franchise. So far. And it also takes a shot at Disney’s second biggest franchise just as Kathleen Kennedy, the woman who ran it into the ground, exits pursued by her poisonous legacy..

The shortfalls with AI are still there. What the people behind this have figured out how to do is work around them. Scrap traditional dialogue. Shift from closeups ‘western’ style to fast-moving special effects scenes and avoid depicting real world environments where the problems can be too obvious.

But the entire process of moviemaking was also about directors and technical people figuring out how to overcome the limitations of the medium as they’ve been doing for over a century.

Can AI take down IP? Suddenly it doesn’t seem that unlikely. And that would have devastating consequences for Hollywood.

Combine with a Gen Z that has trouble sitting through full length movies and paying attention to them, the end of Hollywood may be near. The industry might have a better future if it legitimately commanded the loyalty of audiences instead of insulting them using its monopolies to build empires of intellectual property. But what happens when the internet does to its monopoly what it’s always done to intellectual property?