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We have said it here a few times. The cost of movies is just going up and up and up. Box office take, on the other hand, is not. Even a run-of-the-mill Marvel Studios movie seems to come with a budget over $250 million. Meanwhile, elsewhere at Disney, they can’t even buy a hit for another third on top of that. Theater attendance is up post-COVID, but it is not growing exponentially like the costs are.
James Cameron thinks he knows why. CGI is simply too expensive now. Also, he thinks he has the answer – AI.
Thousands of industry voices just cried out in terror. Hollywood talent is notoriously sensitive about the coming AI revolution. There have been strikes over it. With working conditions for VFX workers also being famously eroded, this news will go down like a cup of cold sick in some quarters.
Cameron addressed this on the Boz To The Future podcast (via Dark Horizons and Variety), and said that blockbusters are simply too expensive right now to remain sustainable and said, to survive, they must:
“…cut the cost of [VFX] in half”.
Cameron is as much an engineer as he is a filmmaker. Maybe he needs a new job title other than director? How about “Movie Engineer”? His films tend to pioneer new technology, often either created or perfected under his watch for the projects themselves.
So it may be with AI. Cameron has recently joined the board at Stability AI, the company behind the AI text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. He aimed to understand how to leverage the technology without it wiping out jobs. As he said on the podcast:
“My goal was not necessarily make a s— pile of money. The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.
And it’s not just hypothetical. If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see – ‘Dune,’ ‘Dune: Part Two,’ or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films – we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half.
Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
With mid-budget action movies seemingly dead and buried unless they star Jason Statham, and other genres also fading from cinema and heading for streaming, the death of blockbusters would leave the cinematic experience really struggling. Can Cameron come up with the answer?
The post Cameron Says AI Must “Halve The Cost OF CGI” appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
