Hollywood’s AI rampage

JANICE MIN: Hollywood is not really good about putting up a fight, right? They’re always fighting yesterday’s AI battle because the technology is moving so fast. How can you predict? Look at just the advancement from a year ago, from five months ago. It’s a little bit of a branding problem for certain AI tools here. It’s also an ethical problem because some of them are just taking and stealing. IP is the foundation of Hollywood and the value of Hollywood. When that just gets ripped off wholesale, you’re entering uncharted territory.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Janice Min, CEO of The Ankler. Janice is a repeat guest and fan favorite on Rapid Response for her unvarnished insider’s view of Hollywood. In today’s episode, we start with the surprising success of Zootopia 2 at the box office, and then dig into AI’s overnight emergence as a threat to the entertainment industry, from so-called synthetic performances, to plummeting production employment, to the buzz around OpenAI’s animated feature critters. We also run through other big media headlines right now, including the Warner Brothers Discovery bidding war, Disney’s standoff with YouTube, Netflix’s foray into video podcasts and more. Let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian, I’m here with Janice Min, founder and CEO of The Ankler. Janice, welcome back to the show. Always good to see you.

MIN: Good to see you. Glad to be here.

Copy LinkThe box office surprise of Zootopia 2

SAFIAN: I know we’re going to talk about AI, but I’ve got to ask you about Zootopia 2, a wild surprise, at least to me. The fourth highest grossing global box office opening ever, $550 million? Where did this come from?

MIN: I think the people who were least expecting this, it was Disney, right? This is like old school Hollywood in terms of the kinds of surprises you can get, because as you know, the surprises are usually not good surprises. It’s usually, “Oh my God, our tracking betrayed us.” This was an amazing surprise, a great gift. I think what no one, at least I haven’t seen yet, what no one’s figured out is what exactly resonated with the Chinese here.

SAFIAN: The huge numbers were coming from overseas.

MIN: Well, what’s interesting in particular about the success of Zootopia is that international performance has been on a steady decline for movies, and it keeps going down and down. You’ve had all these huge movies in the U.S. tank overseas, this changed that narrative.

SAFIAN: This time of year, you get these family movies, I guess, that do well. Then, there are all of these award season contenders. Although there’s been talk that this year those offerings have been flat.

MIN: Oh my God, nose dive. This is the Hollywood dichotomy or the Hollywood trap. Because we live in such a bubble here, they’re so consumed by awards, and they think everyone else is sitting there on the edge of their seat wanting to know who gets a nomination for an Oscar, when in fact people just want to go to the movies and have a good time. They were marketing these movies as big movies when they’re these small platform releases from independent studios. You have to open this weird, crazy thing where then they open on 2,500 screens and you set yourself up for a disappointment.

The Springsteen movie with Jeremy Allen White, I think it made like a couple of million dollars on its opening weekend. Everyone’s mad, right? The distributor’s mad. AMC theaters are mad. It’s embarrassing. Then, we’ve had this internal funny chat here about the Vanity Fair Hollywood cover that has all men. Boy, what did they call it, “here come the boys” or whatever the cover line was. You could look at it and annotate it and be like, “That movie bombed, bombed, bombed, bombed.” It’s been an unprecedented run of people not coming out to the films. On the flip side of that you would say, “Because we’re all trained to wait for it in three weeks to come out on a streaming platform.”

SAFIAN: Right. No, they should have just put out Zootopia 1 in all those things. It’s the lead-in to Zootopia 2. Who knew that that was the ticket?

MIN: Bob, you just gave Bob Iger an idea. I’m sure the re-release of Zootopia 1 is coming imminently to a theater near you.

SAFIAN: Yes, I’m sure they’re building Zootopia area plans for all the theme parks now, right? Particularly in China? Yeah.

MIN: Right, Disney Shanghai, right?

Copy LinkHollywood vs AI

SAFIAN: I really did want to talk to you about AI in Hollywood because I know it’s something you’ve been focused on. As my producers know, I’m low-key obsessed about all the AI fueled video creation tools, but there’s more going on. I see this Vanity Fair talking about Hollywood’s AI freakout, and one of your writers at The Ankler talking about Hollywood going to war with AI. Are things really that inflamed? It seems like it’s fun to me, but of course, I’m not in the business.

MIN: Oh, Bob, you podcast people. Just wait till automated Bob is sitting in this chair. It is pretty inflamed. I think, okay, so we just want to set the scene here. We had these strikes that feel like yesterday, but they ended in ’23 or ’22, God, who’s keeping track? But the central issue in those labor disputes was AI. It overwhelmed all the other discussions around money and residuals, and it became AI protection. Since that time, the industry has continued to contract more. Unemployment in Los Angeles is 30% above the national average, which is crazy. This is not Detroit. This is Los Angeles, which is a dream destination for so many people.

The cost of living has continued to increase, and people believe that AI and automation is playing a part in this. It’s both, I think a reality, but also like the bogeyman that you can put all your anxiety onto AI.

SAFIAN: I have this theory that AI replacing jobs today, a lot of those attributed layoffs across all industries are belt tightening. It’s like you’re blaming it on the technology as opposed to it actually being caused by it. How does that net out in Hollywood?

MIN: Well, okay, I think a lot of studios are doing what I would call anticipatory layoffs, thinking that AI is going to be the savior for their bottom line. You’re looking at Warner Brothers Discovery, which has $36 billion in debt and is going to end up in new hands relatively soon. You have Netflix, which is the biggest producer in Hollywood, definitely thinking about how you lower production costs when you create at that volume. This is in some ways like an M&A dream or as writers in Los Angeles like to call it late stage capitalism, where humans are just incidental to the production workflow, that you can make more, do more, spend less with AI.

AI is the catchall phrase, but I think that there were two things that really were these watershed moments in the last few months, one of them was GPT-5. Suddenly, as our writer Erik Barmack said, people in town are now using the phrase, “run this through GPT-5.” That means scripts, that means story bibles, which are the guiding principle for a TV series. That has really altered writer’s rooms and writing out of the gate. But what the peril is on GPT-5 is there’s been this long farm system in Hollywood where writer’s assistants come in. They’re the ones who are taking the notes, they’re the ones pouring through scripts. That whole apprenticeship class is definitely getting winnowed down.

SAFIAN: You’ve said that everyone in Hollywood is lying about AI just a little bit. Studios understating their AI use publicly because I guess they’re worried about the unions. I don’t know. Vendors overstating what they can do because they want people to buy their products. Then writers and producers hiding this use of AI in their workflow, what you’re talking about running it through GPT-5.

MIN: It’s a little bit like being a Trump supporter. If you’re in LA, you’re like, you’re not going to say it out loud. You might find some like-minded people. You’re worried that if you say it out loud, people are going to be mad at you. But that’s a little bit what AI is here right now. I would venture to say, 98% of writers have ChatGPT on their device. It’s irresistible as a writer. I’m sure you have found this, Bob. It’s irresistible to tinker with it. It’s almost like a thought partner that exists now for writers. Remember, a lot of these writers are writing in coffee shops or sitting at home alone.

SAFIAN: Nothing harder than the blank page or the blank screen, right?

Copy LinkTilly Norwood and the rise of AI-generated celebrities

MIN: Well, you never have to have a blank page again with GPT-5.

SAFIAN: That’s right, but you can have a lot of slop too, right?

MIN: Well, okay. This is, I think, the thing that’s really scary, is that there’s an assumption that people like quality things, that they only want to see well-produced, great things. But I think we’re learning that a lot of the audience doesn’t really differentiate, notice, or care. That is the big fear for Hollywood and what its essential qualities are, which is a level of production that has been unprecedented in the world. That you can make storytelling of the highest caliber with the highest quality people. Then, along comes Tilly Norwood.

SAFIAN: Explain to folks who don’t know who Tilly Norwood is. This is an AI generated, young, brunette female character, right?

MIN: Part of the reason people freaked out about Tilly Norwood, who is this AI generated “actress,” you can’t really anthropomorphize her because she’s not a human, but people refer to her as an actress. Seamlessly human in presentation, with personality and freckles and could deliver different kinds of lines and notes, and that was really the tipping point. I interviewed her creator, this woman Eline Van der Velden, at Web Summit in Portugal on stage. Eline swears there were agents clamoring. Things started to boil over with Tilly, but then things really boiled over with Sora 2 when Sora 2 came out just a few weeks after Tilly.

This is the very Sam Altman Silicon Valley way of doing things. They just took everyone’s IP and put it into Sora 2 videos and likenesses and images and actors and actresses, and then end up doing that classic Silicon Valley thing of like, “Oops, my bad.”

SAFIAN: Listen, I’ve been watching the advancements in these tools, Runway and Adobe’s Firefly and VO3 earlier, but the Sora 2 was like people could basically create great looking fakes with celebrities and stuff.

MIN: Yeah, with this voice prompt, right? You think about how painstakingly these sorts of – even a commercial, even a marketing clip, how painstaking the process is to get those produced in Hollywood. It requires committees and approvals, approvals by the actor and actress and how much are you paying them and all pre-negotiated limits around what you’re doing. Then, suddenly, oh my God, anyone with a phone can just spit it out and create something that might even look better and more expensive.

SAFIAN: Is the fear that this is pirating my IP, who’s losing money today? Or, is it just like, “Well, maybe in the future.”

MIN: No, no.

SAFIAN: I guess this is all what the next round of union discussions is looking at.

MIN: Can you imagine? There’s this phrase that’s being used a lot about the unions here, which is they’re always fighting yesterday’s AI battle, because the technology is moving so fast. How can you predict what you actually are negotiating against in the next two to three years? Look at just the advancement from a year ago, the advancement from five months ago. The fact that now OpenAI is freaked out by Gemini, like, “What? What’s happening?” I have to mention also, something that is looming large over Hollywood is this OpenAI movie called Critterz, with a Z. Critterz is going to the Cannes Film Festival, and it looks a lot like a Pixar movie.

Hollywood has had special effects, VFX for a long time, and how much VFX has been using what would now be classified as AI tools? I think it’s a little bit of a branding problem with AI for certain AI tools here. It’s also an ethical problem because some of them are just taking and stealing. IP is the foundation of Hollywood and the value of Hollywood. When that just gets ripped off wholesale, you’re entering uncharted territory.

SAFIAN: Uncharted territory indeed. What does the rise of Tilly Norwood and Sora 2 mean for the future of casting real actors versus AI? How do we balance the concerns over AI tools with the benefit of more democratized creativity? We’ll talk more about that, plus other entertainment headlines after the break. Stay with us. 

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Before the break, The Ankler’s Janice Min talked about how Hollywood is in a panic over the impact of new AI tools. Now, she talks about unintended consequences of democratizing creativity and the shifting balance of power between Hollywood and big tech players. Plus, today’s biggest non-AI media headlines. Let’s dive back in. 

Copy LinkThe future of AI in Hollywood

These new tools, I find myself excited by them because of how easy it is or seemingly easy it is for anyone to create a high quality film or clip. At the same time, it’s a little scary because anybody can create it. This democratizing, isn’t it good for creativity?

MIN: It sounds like you’ve been talking to Sam Altman, Bob. That’s their spin. It democratizes creativity. The barrier of entry has been lowered. All of that is true. All of that is true. But I think you could also think about it in the same way we think about social media. Social media definitely got rid of gatekeepers. Anyone can become a star. Anyone can have a viral moment. Has it made us better? Has it helped our brains and helped our kids and all those things? There are good and bad to all of this. I think what we’ve seen with the instant adoption of creators by Gen Z, for example:  That is their culture now. It is not so much film and television.

SAFIAN: That’s where their celebrities come from. Yeah.

MIN: That’s where their celebrities come from. You’re going to see this creator AI meld that I believe is underway now. You look at YouTube and Neal Mohan really pushing for the use of Gemini by creators. We had an interview with Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte this week, where he is predicting that Meta is going to go all AI on their platforms and thus even diminished creators who are there currently. It’s going to be how the audience responds. Does the audience want real things or do they just want to be entertained?

SAFIAN: When you talk about Tilly Norwood, this idea of a synthetic performance essentially becoming reality. Today, directors aren’t really casting Tilly. Will every director in the future cast an AI because they’re easier to control and you own the IP? Or, are you going to have different groups of directors, like some who work with human actors and some who work with AI?

MIN: Budget is the number one reason movies don’t get made, or things don’t get made in Hollywood. If you have a crowd scene, if you’re doing Saving Private Ryan and you’re showing an armada, fleet after fleet of American soldiers storming the beach at Normandy, those can be AI generated now. You don’t have to hire 2,000 extras. Those sorts of things, that’s where I think it’s really going to start to hit. I think it’s going to start to hit in voiceover work, because anyone’s voice can be replicated. It’s going to start hitting hard in commercial work. It already is.

You and I are not going to know the difference between a synthetic voice and a human voice. That’s where it’s really going to start to impact and further erode the middle class of Hollywood.

SAFIAN: Within the industry, how does the industry respond, the studios? If OpenAI is worth half a trillion dollars and raising money at will, like a 10th of Warner Brothers, Discovery is a 10th of that size. Is this destined to be another wave of Silicon Valley taking over Hollywood the way Netflix and Amazon and Apple did the last wave?

MIN: Well, you know Hollywood is not really good about putting up a fight. Part of it is the decentralization of Hollywood as a place. I’m on my own, you’re on your own, and let’s fight our own fights. The money is irresistible. If Warner Brothers is worth 50 whatever billion dollars, depending on who’s bidding on it at any given day, and OpenAI is worth $500 billion, it’s not hard to see who might win that fight and who’s also willing to litigate and who the future buyers are. David Zaslav has hung a huge for sale sign out in front. I don’t think he’s selling to an AI company right now, but someone else will.

When shareholders are picking or having a voice in where these transactions happen, some of them are not going to blink at an AI company taking the IP.

SAFIAN: You worry about that because why? A lot of industries are being disrupted by this, but what will we lose?

MIN: Okay, that’s a good point. Why do I worry about that? Okay. I worry about people not having jobs. I guess I worry about the quality of storytelling. Remember, AI can only train on what exists. We already are in a time where originality is not really rewarded. We see this with these awards films, taking it back to that conversation that couldn’t bring an audience. Hollywood already has an over-reliance on IP, sequels, universes. This will only accelerate that impulse because it’ll be so easy to produce. I worry about people who work in this industry who think in some way it’s going to come back and that production’s going to increase.

I worry about people who can’t afford to live in Los Angeles or Atlanta or any of these production hubs that are now starting to really struggle. But I guess essentially, storytelling is such an essential part of the human experience. When you think about the best movies that have had influence in your life, my life, people you know, it wasn’t Spider-Man 5. We do lose an essential part of what makes us human and connection. It was fun when you used to go see a movie that everyone else saw, and you could go talk about it at dinner. I think as we lose all these touchpoints with humans, with other humans, that’s depressing to me.

SAFIAN: I think there’s always been some measure of entertainment slop, whether it’s AI influenced or not. Zootopia 2 is successful because it may be a sequel, but it was a script and an execution that was emotionally connected. It works. I feel like that’s still going to be the differentiating factor of anything else.

MIN: Yes. Okay. Then I’m going to contradict what I just said. The top creators will supersede AI. They’ll be the ones driving the culture with AI as the long tail catching up. I think there will be value. If you are lucky enough in your career to have crossed the threshold into top-tier, I’m not worried about you because I think your value will only continue to grow. It’s for people who are up and coming, who haven’t had their break and might deserve one. That’s who I think might miss out on their decade of opportunity.

SAFIAN: Hollywood has been producing a lot of content anyway. Now, there’s even more with all of the AI. For you, how do you keep up with the output of the industry of new movies, new shows? Do you run anything through an AI yourself to speed up the process?

MIN: No.

SAFIAN: How do you keep up?

MIN: From 2016 to maybe the end of COVID, that was when we were all talking about the same shows and every conversation would be like, “What are you watching?” I’m going to write that down. I’m going to put that on my list. We’re not really talking about that as a culture anymore. Your favorite show is not the same as anyone else’s favorite show that you might be talking to, and that’s hard. We thought we were fragmented before, but now, oh my God. But on the flip side, these weird things still happen. We have an interview today with the executive at NBC who oversaw the Thanksgiving Macy’s Day Parade, and they had their highest ratings ever this past Thursday.

Like, why? This is why Hollywood will never give up yet, you can still hit it out of the park and sometimes you don’t know why, but you can still do it. When you do it, it’s golden.

Copy LinkFuture of Warner Brothers Discovery, YouTube TV vs Disney, & Trump goes after late night TV

SAFIAN: Can I take you through a handful of headline topics, get your quick take on them?

MIN: Yes. Of course.

SAFIAN: All right. We alluded to this, the Hollywood deal making, the future of Warner Brothers Discovery. There’s a lot of back and forth. Any predictions on what’s going to happen, what it means?

MIN: If you’re bidding against Larry Ellison, I think you think Larry Ellison’s going to win. Trump has his thumb very hard on the scale. The regulatory issues in this era we’re in are going to be challenging. The money is on the Ellisons. There are lots of people who might prefer to see it go to Netflix, which is a funny thing because Netflix was the enemy for a long time, but now Netflix is looking really good.

SAFIAN: YouTube TV has clashed with Disney. They had this stalemate over distribution, pulled all these Disney properties off of YouTube TV. They came to an agreement. Any lasting messages about where the power sits between platforms and content owners, or is this standard noise in the industry?

MIN: It was one of those situations where Disney had a lot less leverage than it used to. The power of the platform beats everything else at the moment. Distribution is everything. Disney has their own. Remember, they have all this talent that wants to be seen where they’re supposed to be seen, where they think they’re going to be seen. They have advertisers who want to be where they’re supposed to be. If you’re Disney, do you forego the distribution of YouTube TV? Eh, maybe not.

SAFIAN: All right. Let me ask you about the latest round of President Trump’s attack on late night TV. It seemed like things had reached a climax with the Jimmy Kimmel FCC brouhaha, but now Trump has recently lashed out at Seth Meyers, telling NBC to fire him. Are networks now prepared? Is there a playbook for responding to Trump now?

MIN: It seems like the response is no response, that if you wait long enough, he moves onto something else, notwithstanding. If you have a regulatory issue in front of him, and remember, Comcast does potentially with Warner Brothers Discovery. I think you’re going to play it differently. I think Disney, what happened with Disney where they put Kimmel back on the air and there was no consequence, that’s the model that I believe everyone’s going to follow now. Especially if you saw the backlash that happened with Disney when they yanked Kimmel, nobody wants that again, and that’s scarier. Are you siding with consumers or are you siding with the president? That’s a decision that all these places may have to make before this term is over.

SAFIAN: Before I let you go, I have to ask as a podcaster myself, Netflix recently announced bringing video podcasts onto the platform.

MIN: Oh my God.

SAFIAN: Should I not be talking to you? Should I be on the horn to Netflix immediately trying to make a deal? Is this a shot across the bow to YouTube? What’s this about?

MIN: Well, they can’t quit trying to fight with YouTube. They’re very clear, we’re not competing with traditional Hollywood streamers. Our competition is YouTube. They are in this global march to get as many eyeballs as possible to get people to put down their money. That involves everything from taking YouTubers and reformatting them, paying them to have a second window for Netflix, and that is paying off and that’s working for them. It’s just engagement. I think when we think about these formats of television, like 30 minutes and 60 minute shows, that was an advertiser generated format. It’s not a consumer generated format.

You are trying to just keep people stuck in your platform, caught in the loop for as long as possible, include people of every age. You want to find ways to grow your North American audience. If that means you have to reach into Gen Alpha and Gen Z and drag them into Netflix and make them put down their own credit card, that’s another way to do it. Remember, they have advertising now. They also want to like engagement and all of that. All of this is going to matter. But that said, Bob, I don’t think you should reach out to Netflix yet because apparently the deals are not great. People are not happy with what they’re being offered, so you need to hold out for a lot more money.

SAFIAN: All right. All right. I’ll take that advice then. I’ll hold out for more. Janice, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining us.

MIN: Thank you for having me. Always fun.

SAFIAN: I always get a kick out of talking to Janice, find myself viewing things in fresh ways. One thing I keep coming back to is her question about how much the average media consumer really cares about quality. As someone who’s dedicated a career trying to produce something of quality, the notion that quality doesn’t matter is disheartening. Of course, there’s always been cookie cutter content, but with the proliferation of AI, generating slop is a lot easier, and to be honest, it’s better. The bar has gone up, but I don’t know. Things that are really successful tend to be distinctive. Zootopia 2, it may not be your cup of tea, but it’s damn effective execution. That distinctiveness flows not from the tech, but from human input. Now, just because something is handcrafted by a human doesn’t necessarily make it high quality, but the time, energy, and the vulnerability it takes to connect emotionally, that’s the crucial factor. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.