Lionsgate sells movie catalog to AI video startup Runway hoping to replace artists and FX
Lionsgate sells movie catalog to AI video startup Runway hoping to replace artists and FX
Hollywood studio Lionsgate has sold its entire back catalog of movies and TV shows to AI video startup Runway to train a new model on, which Lionsgate will then have access to. [WSJ, archive] Lions…
128This is a process known as proletarianization. It happened to the artisans when we moved to industrial manufacture, it happened to the pastoralists when we moved to factory farming, and now they can finally go after artists and techs and editors.
54Shut up with your history man I don't want to learn and want to repeat until the earth boils, what's so wrong with that?
No but really, if these tools were actually to be used in such an egregious manor of which their creators envision, their little short term stock bump means actual energy and water scarcity for a lot of us. Yay. Could be any other proletarianization, but we get the one that could really fuck us over
13I am wondering if that would work for books. Most books are marketed as: best selling author brandon sanderson etc. So if a book doesn't have an author on the cover, it would be hard to sell imo. For example, when I am looking for a book to read, I always check out the author and their other works.
Maybe it will be something like this: AI writer based on best selling author brandon sardersons.
But that is probably even worse than having no author on the cover.
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Fortunately, that is sure to fail. Unless we find a way to make ai have a desire to spend. No money to spend? No products to sell. Entire system goes out of balance.
24Yes, but will humans realize that before everyone has starved and the knowledge of how to do those things is gone?
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Everyone boo this studio
36The need for UBI continues to grow at an alarming rate.
35best we can do is 100 free chatgpt queries per month. If you can't make a living from that you need to catch up.
19Will never happen. Those at the top would sooner fund extermination squads to round up the poor than send a single cent in aid.
15In a way they already are, with the rich people funding the far right extremist ecosystem.
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Lionsgate hopes to save “millions and millions” replacing all those tawdry storyboard artists and visual effects crew with “cutting-edge, capital-efficient content creation opportunities,” said vice chairman Michael Burns.
that sounds entirely unfit for human consumption. I can’t wait for Saw XV: Capital-Efficient Content Creation Opportunity! pump that melty-faced banal nonsense straight into my consumer veins!
35"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator."
13
I hope it goes tits up right quick.
I can count the times I went to the cinema in the last 10 years on 1 hand. Only "Interstellar" was worth the big screen.
32I don't know why people dislike that movie. It rocked my socks
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The Hollywood bankruptcy auctions in a few years are gonna be lit
27I can't wait to see their next horror movie, Eleven Fingers.
21Ah yes, the enshittening continues
19Not even slightly bothered by this. The “industry” has always looked for ways to minimize production costs while optimizing profits. They are in the volatile high risk business of selling art for profit.
What successful studios understand is you have to take the losses with the wins, take risks and champion new artists. Placing trust in the artists to know what will be profitable.
The studios that rely on gimmicks, regurgitating old ideas and building projects like they are in the toilet paper business are the ones that die. Lionsgate is simply signaling that it doesn’t know what it’s doing and will pivot or die.
The art of filmmaking only works with human hands, there is no amount of 3D,4D, IMAX, recliner seat CGI in your face AI that will replace it. They are selling bespoke handcrafted free range storytelling. The second the audience smells preservatives, Lionsgate will be filing for Ch11.
16I'm worried the studios might be too big to fail. Or rather, too big to fail fast enough not to have the fallout of their loathsome ideas screw all of us over.
They don't make non-"smart" TVs anymore and that's not because nobody objected.
What are you gonna do when the other major studios follow suit, adding that sweet sweet AI aspartame in their franchise schlock? Not go and see Batman vs. Darth Vader 3: The Rebackening? Watch an indie movie instead? Don't make me laugh. Your friends are already depicting you as a soyjack who insists on watching foreign 6-hour black-and-white silent films about communism.
6Huh. Aspartame. I never thought of AI as aspartame but that is a really good comparison. They're not the real deal, you can taste the difference although most people wouldn't care, it's cheaper, and it is detrimental to the consumer (the effect of AI being the death of real creativity and wonder about what the human mind can come up with).
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I can't say I know what Liongate's plan is, precisely, but I think you're hitting this on the head.
Remember. Most corporate strategy could be summarized as persuading investors for more debt. It doesn't really tell the whole story of what is or will happen, only what needs to be said loudly in a room full of fools holding the money bags.
4
Yuck!
9seeing overpaid movie stars get replaced by ai will be fun.
-3Most them have protections in place preventing use of their likeness. Directors and other high level professionals will probably have enough money to sue anything that comes out of Runway. It's the artists, vfx, wardrobe, etc (i.e. low level people) that are going to get fucked. None of the savings will be passed to consumers and we will get derivative or rehashed works as a result. Only hope is that the money propping these AI replacements dries up because the studios can't attract movie goers with the even more unoriginal shit they will try to push.
17Yeah this isn't the plan.
The plan is to get the stars in for a couple of days in front of a green screen, have them say their lines, then use "AI" to generate the rest of the scene. You want to get rid of all the labor around scouting sets, getting permits, constructing them, lighting them, feeding the crew etc. That's where a big part of the cost of making a movie lies.
12Its only a matter of time before tech will be able to generate controlled/scripted moving images of full synthetic humans. No actors needed. Will it be shit and devoid of any emotion? Absolutely. Will the mass devour it like crazy because it is heavily marketed and promoted on social media and other channels as the next new big thing? Absolutely. They will love the 200th Marvel CU generated crapfest and with not a single frame recorded on physical media. Because they NEED to see deadpool giving a HJ to magneto while making an edgy remark about godzilla's sausage apparatus. And will it generate millions of revenue for the studio while also saving millions in actor fees, fx and other trades? You got it. The director is now a member of the board of directors.
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