In fact, I'll wager to say that Disney and Pixar are both toast in just a few short years. You won't need Disney, $50-$100M in production funding, or more than one person to make a film. Films will cost $5,000. Then $1,000. Then very little at all.
Everything visual. Cartoons. Anime. Movies. Influencers. Actors. Porn stars.
Music is going to be right there with it.
Yeah, again, not how things works. Neither financially, nor the technology itself, nor the craft of film production. Not to be a party pooper, but the landscape will still look mostly the same in 5 years.
AI is maturing fast. It's already on some people's smartphones.
0: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/4.0/
Generative AI is already powerful enough to replace big studios for short skits on YouTube. But a full length cinema-quality movie is a totally different ball game.
That all said, I definitely don’t think it will take 20 years to get there either. I do agree that the field is moving fast.
But seriously, the edge research is already ready to put an end to animation for good. Classic Disney animation -- that's 100% done as of right now. Today. It's about to be productized.
It won't be long until we have photorealism too.
Please don't be like this. You're more useful to the world if you forget everything you know and start dreaming again.
Maybe one day in the future, movies become a bit more like gaming. Kind of like "holo-novels" in Star Trek, where the story does adapt to suit the individual.
This isn't going to happen in the next 10 years though. Even technology aside, the various Hollywood unions wouldn't allow it.
If you look at the last big shift in the way society consumed content (from CDs to streaming) it took decades from the invention of Napster before anything like Spotify was successful. And that wasn't because the general public was slow to adopt. It was purely because distributors dragged their heals.
As I said, YouTube quality is already there. But cinema quality still requires VFX people because gen AI hallucinates a lot of weird stuff like 7 fingers on a hand.
You need to think of gen AI like self driving cars. We’ve had semi-autonomous cars for years already but they’re still unsafe to be fully self driving. You still need a human to make corrections. And the same is true for gen AI.
Until the acceptance ratio improves drastically, gen AI is not going to replace Disney.
The only humans left in Hollywood will be copyright lawyers!
I don't know why you have such a bad outlook about this.
I have wanted to direct epic fantasy films my entire life, and this is the first tangible shot I have at making something that might look like a "blockbuster". My chances of doing that without GenAI were slim to none. Hollywood is a steep pyramid.
I don't know how you can't be excited. This is the dreams-come-true timeline.
Yeah, I guess it would be awesome to just have an AI build your dream movie, but if you have a good script and a couple thousand bucks you can go out and find some actors and make something real right now. If it's good enough, you can get a shot at directing something massive where you actually have control over how your vision is executed, rather than sending your ideas into a "black box".
There's also the problem that visual fx are already pretty cheap, and no longer a reason to go see a movie. No one can even count the number of Viking shows or Lost Starship movies on streaming services, or tell them apart. It's not like when the original Jurassic Park came out and everyone was like I HAVE TO SEE THESE DINOSAURS. (My best friend recently described Avatar 2 as "that movie with the flying blue turds").
So my point is that the market is already oversaturated... just like mobile gaming. Chasing cool graphics, even if you get a monentary viral hit, you just end up lost in the flood of noise when everyone else has access to the same technology.
The pyramid is a good thing, actually, because it forces you to be imaginitive. The people at the top are less imaginative because they think their vast resources can compensate for bad writing. See: George Lucas.
Without a compelling story, a movie is worse than watching someone else play a video game. And with a compelling story, it doesn't matter if it's set on Mars or in your basement. I think it's also why the best games aren't the ones with the best rendering engines, but the ones with the best story and mechanics.
> the most interesting films involve interhuman drama that speaks to my own emotional experience, and often just consist of a lot of people talking with occasional plot twists and unexpected bursts of action
And, for that matter, the first few seasons of TNG.
(Far as Trek goes, I liked the original series.)
As someone who didn't see TOS in its original run but appreciated it in occasional reruns, and as a huge fan of the original cast movies, it was... weird. But good weird, mostly, weird in a way that somehow captured the zaniness weirdness of TOS, and which was somewhat glossed over in the original movies when they made the jump to Hollywood production values.
I'd check it out if you haven't, just to see what's out there. For that matter, I quite enjoyed Lower Decks, as the Star Trek universe really needed that kind of dedicated comedic outlet, but from a clearly fannish perspecitve that isn't afraid of making very niche in-universe inside-jokes but always from a place of kindness and respect to both the original source material and to the viewer.
In theory yes, but imagine having to fight with another 8 billions directors to find someone who watches your movie. The day we can make our films at home (read as: everyone can make their films at home), is probably the day we'll need to create our own virtual audience as well, as the chances of being watched by some real person will be lower than winning a lottery.
Afaik that arrangement works quite well by the standards of both the creatives and viewers (and presumably Google?)
<quote> The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. </quote>
Disney won't be toast, they'll be a full continental breakfast in a 5-star hotel served by Star Wars Mickey in a waiter's costume.
I fully expect a lot of large-model stuff will become legally nuclear over time, much like the sampling culture in music died off.
Who knows?
So a fun thing is happening on Twitch right now! VTubers are improving [1] against LLM-powered actors. They're effectively able to put on one-person improv shows in fully dynamic worlds. It's wild.
Check out CodeMiko (probably NSFW). It's captivating to behold.
[1] (yes, we all know)
And what makes you think that Pixar and Disney won't want to automate the process of movie creation? The movie streaming platforms all reached a equilibrium, so they would work on the "full self-making movie" I suppose?