Summary
If you want a clear understanding of how AI is affecting Hollywood … good luck. Some of the industry loathes the technology, with screenwriters, directors, and actors alike vowing never to use AI in their work—or collaborate with those who do. Others are much more open to the potential for AI to act as everything from creative partner to cost-cutting engine. And a rare few, Ben Affleck included, are already making millions by capitalizing on AI’s nascent potential to (they argue) streamline and improve the filmmaking process. At WIRED, we’re constantly doing our best to document AI’s transformational effects on the entertainment business, for better and for worse. (If you haven’t read Ruth Fowler’s recent essay for us, on going from a screenwriter to an underemployed LLM trainer, I highly recommend it.) But in an effort to get the most nuanced possible view, I wanted to talk to someone who knows the industry and its players inside and out. Matt Belloni, a founding partner at Puck, has covered Hollywood for decades. He writes a scoopy newsletter (What I’m Hearing …) and hosts a scoopy podcast (The Town) that frequently focus on AI and Big Tech as both become increasingly dominant forces across entertainment. Belloni also happens to be a former lawyer, making him the ideal person to ask about the ongoing, and highly consequential, debates over AI and copyright, IP, and celebrity likeness. Belloni was generous enough to give me an hour of his time, and we managed to cover all the bases—from whether Hollywood types side-eyed Ben Affleck after he sold an AI startup to Netflix for 587 million. And I barely knew he had an AI company until he sold it. I asked the question, “Was this a 600 million?” That’s a lot of money. He’s gonna make more money on that than he’s made on any of his movies put together. Well, he’s had some, I don’t know, expensive divorces. I know. The question is, did he launch it when he was married to JLo? I imagine their prenups probably contemplate their separate property. I think they had a very expensive house they were trying to offload at one point. I’m a big entertainment gossip reader. There have been a bunch of deals between tech firms and Hollywood. There was the 200 million. I mean, they can, but it’s very difficult to make them. They’re made in California with a California workforce. They have their own special process that is very labor-intensive, and they haven’t used AI to the extent that they maybe could. If we are looking at a new landscape where movies just aren’t going to gross as much as they did, you have to look at bringing the cost down. And the guilds aren’t bringing the cost of labor down. The unions are not willing to do that. So where does it come from? It comes from non-unionized labor that is, for the most part, the below-the-line people and the technology. That makes me think of Christopher Nolan and The Odyssey. It had a huge cast, it was made all over the world. It’s making crazy money. And Chris Nolan, who I believe still professes to not having a phone, not surprisingly has also been critical of AI while also being open to its uses, right? He’s kind of a fence-sitter. But he has also pointed out that younger generations have rejected a lot of quote-unquote slop, right? They’re looking for authenticity. That said, are the Chris Nolans of the world going to continue to be even more the exception to the rule? He is a one of one at this point, where he came into this situation with all the credibility and clout in the world, having won the Oscar for Oppenheimer and having made a billion dollars off that movie. The Odyssey, if it is made at all by another filmmaker, it’s made at a much lower cost, not 300 million. You don’t get to have all those stars in it. You just don’t get to do it. But what I would argue to the studios is that is exactly why it broke through, is that it smells different. If you look at the trailer, if you look at everything around it, it smells authored, and the audience can tell when something is authored. In a world where you can create all the visual effects you want, there’s something about seeing The Odyssey and knowing, because they are very good at marketing this, that this is the vision of one guy who you trust and who is gonna show you something real. And I say real in the sense that movies are increasingly going to be split into movies that are filmed with real people and real scenarios and then those that are just either generative AI in practice or generative AI from the get-go. There’s going to be a split between things that we find authentic and those that we just kind of passively enjoy. Just sort of consume, for lack of a better term. That’s where social media is going, and the more social video goes that direction, I think the bigger the market opening is for these kinds of big, special, real movies. But you have a one of one legendary filmmaker like Chris Nolan over here with The Odyssey. Then you have someone like Kane Parsons, who made Backrooms, which made a ton of money for A24. I think it was the highest grossing film that they’ve ever made, and he actually came out and said he would probably make generative AI disappear if he could. I’m curious about the degree to which you think Hollywood executives care about a young filmmaker, with nascent influence and nascent clout, having something to say about that. Do they give a shit? They give a shit in the sense that studios are ultimately in the business of talent relations. They want to appeal to the kinds of people that Kane Parsons represents. The whole reason Christopher Nolan made The Odyssey and Oppenheimer with Universal Pictures was because he was at Warner Bros. for many years, and he woke up one morning in 2020 and all of their movies had been put on HBO Max. The CEO at the time said, “Because of the situation of the world right now, all of the 2021 movies are gonna be put day and date on HBO Max.” That was an example of the CEO thinking tech forward, “We’re gonna give the consumer what they want. We’re going to build our streaming service, even if it means grossing less at the box office.” And the number one filmmaker in town took his talents down the street. They would love to have the next Chris Nolan movie, but instead, Universal, which didn’t do that, they got the number one filmmaker, and they have an amazing relationship with him. So I think to the extent that studios care about talent, and A24 in particular very much cares about talent, because they are not only appealing to those filmmakers as a business, they have a brand. A24 is a brand among people who care about movies, and this Google deal, they took a hit for that. People didn’t like it. Their fans did not like it. If that ultimately comes back to bite them, and they sell fewer A24 hats or scented candles or whatever’s in their merch store today … Please tell me they have scented candles. Oh, they do. I got my podcast producer one of them. And? He said it smelled nice. All right, good. Good for them. But that’s where the studios care. Now, is it gonna stop them? No. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to bring down the cost of movies, and they see it as an evolution. You know, if you ever see the movie Babylon—there were a lot of people in Hollywood that were very apprehensive about sound in movies because it wiped out a whole generation of silent movie stars who had terrible voices and couldn’t articulate themselves. Brad Pitt in that movie is a perfect example. Then there were people that didn’t like television. They thought it would kill the business, and the VCR, and digital, and streaming. All the different technological advancements that have upended Hollywood, the studios see AI as another one of those, and that if they manage it correctly, it can lead to more profitability, and, in their mind, more movies and TV shows. Do you agree with that thesis? That’s the big question. I think it needs to be managed properly, because if they go all in and all of a sudden the NBC fall lineup is a bunch of AI slop … Right. I think you lose the differentiator. AI is gonna be everywhere on social media, and you know better than anyone that the tech companies are going all in on it, and you’re not gonna be able to distinguish what’s real and what’s not real online. So in the future, if you watch a movie like The Odyssey and you see dolphins coming out of the water, you’re gonna think that’s real if the studios manage that right. And it was real in that movie. They happened to shoot on a day when dolphins were beside the boat, and they got a great shot of dolphins jumping up out of the water. And that to me is the differentiator that the Hollywood studios still have, and I would hope that they won’t squander it in pursuit of lowering costs. I want to get to the labor question in all of this. You talked about animation being a place that’s very ripe for this kind of disruption. For animation and everything else in Hollywood, to what extent will unions be able to safeguard the rank and file where AI and job loss is concerned? We’ve seen it come up as an issue in labor negotiations twice now, back in ’23 and then this past year as well. [Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists] is not against AI. They will tell you openly, “We are not against the use of AI. We are against the use of AI that causes job loss for our members.” If you use a synthetic performer in a movie, there is a fee paid that makes it just as costly as using a human actor. So it’s not like, “Let’s populate our movie with AI avatars and save money.” For the Writers Guild, if there is a script on which AI is used, there is going to be a credited writer. AI cannot be the author of a script for the purposes of a guild-covered movie. And that’s important, because ultimately, what are unions? They are for preserving jobs, and they recognize the technology is out there, but they don’t want it to be a replacement. That’s where it gets to the below-the-line union, and it’s much more difficult, because some people are covered, some jobs are covered, some jobs are not covered. Some are members of the Teamsters. Some are members of IATSE, which is a below-the-line union for various roles in the business. There are lots of jobs on animated movies that are not union-covered, and those are the ones that I think are the most vulnerable. I’m not prepared to go all the way to what Jeffrey Katzenberg said a few years ago, where he said something like 80 percent or 90 percent of the workforce on an animated movie will be replaced by AI. I don’t think that’s gonna be the case, at least not for a while, but they are going to eliminate—they already are. They already are eliminating jobs and automating things. I wanted to ask you about what some have called an emerging gray market. We did a story about this. We published an essay by a woman who was a screenwriter and started finding work training AI models. I read that. I thought it was a very funny piece. I thought it was a little bit sad and dystopian, but this idea was that she is basically training herself out of a job. How much do you hear about that happening, that Hollywood workers who are underemployed for a variety of reasons are actually training AI to make a living, regardless of the stigma attached to the technology? I mean, to their knowledge or without their knowledge? Because you could argue that every screenwriter is training AI because the tech companies are scraping at will. We’re gonna get to copyright, but I guess a little bit of both, right? That was an interesting essay, because I had not heard about that happening. I’m sure it does happen. I’m sure that there are jobs out there where you are essentially inputting different scenarios and inputting different types of conversations in order to train AI. I don’t think that’s super prevalent right now, but on the other side of it, there is a widespread fear, in my opinion, in the screenwriting community that the work of screenwriters is being used to train these models without their consent. But isn’t that fear totally well-founded? I mean, hasn’t it been established that obviously all of that work, if it’s public, would’ve been ingested by a model? Yes, but there’s a difference. Well, first of all, I don’t think if you asked Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, on the record, “Do you do this?” they would say yes. Have you actually asked them? We’ve asked them about how their data sets are trained. I mean, they’re trained on the open web. Right. But for the most part, most finished movies are not. You’d have to go to piracy. I see what you mean. Certainly there are no databases where you can just get every single movie screenplay. Now, there are script databases that you could probably access, but I don’t believe every script that’s ever been written is on the internet. As we’re talking, they must be listening to this and thinking, “What an opportunity for us if we have not yet accessed all of that data.” Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m naive about this stuff. This was a couple years ago, but I asked Aaron Sorkin—I had him for an interview—and I had put a bunch of prompts into ChatGPT and asked it to create a scene of The West Wing set in the Trump White House. OK. And it was so bad. It was laughably bad. They were all sitting instead of walking and talking? What were they doing? No, they were walking and talking, but it was just generic dialog. It was stuff that didn’t make sense for a character. Like, it just was nonsensical. Maybe that’s improved. I wanted to ask you about IP and copyright. You used to be an entertainment lawyer, so you are, for many reasons, the perfect person to ask about this. Last year, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, accusing it of IP infringement because its products could create Shrek or Bart Simpson or Darth Vader. Warner Bros. then joined that lawsuit. Page Six recently called that legal war in its jiujitsu phase, because Midjourney’s … What does that mean? Is that a fancy word for discovery? It’s a fancy word for “things are getting violent,” maybe. Because Midjourney’s lawyers are now demanding that those companies disclose the ways they already use AI. When you sue someone, you have to know that they’re gonna come for your information, and that’s what you give up when you file a lawsuit: They have access to your documents and communications just like you have access to theirs. What is your take on that case and on the fair-use issue overall? So, I have an opinion. But let me first say what the status of the law is, because it’s very unclear. There has not been a definitive determination that using copyrighted material in a model is itself copyright infringement. The New York Times is in a very expensive legal battle over the same thing. The better argument for now for these companies to make is that the expression of the output of the model is infringing. You can take every Disney character and put them into a model, but if what it spits out looks too much like Mickey Mouse, then that itself is infringement, not the ingestion of all of those characters. Yes, that makes sense. Now, the entertainment industry would very much like to change that determination and to get courts to rule that the mere act of ingestion is infringement. We’ll see if that ultimately holds water, because it doesn’t look like that’s the way things are going. But, you know, there was just this settlement in the book case where a bunch of authors sued, I believe it was OpenAI, it might’ve been Anthropic. I think it was Anthropic. It was Anthropic, OK. And the settlement in that one was [40 million to make. Tell us more about that mess. How did the movie end up getting made? How did it get dropped, and why? It’s pretty simple. This project was shopped to the market. Amazon was interested in it. It was from a filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino, who they have had a relationship with. He made Challengers for them, and he made a Julia Roberts film last year called After the Hunt for them, and they wanted to do it. They knew the script. I read the script and wrote about it last summer. At the time I said, “Listen, this is a little dicey, because it’s an indictment of Sam Altman and a scary situation.” It goes into that weekend when the cocreators [of OpenAI] and everybody turned on Sam, and he was kicked out of the company and then essentially got it back and it went on its path … That was like the Super Bowl for WIRED. That was a wild weekend. So it essentially dramatizes that event, and nobody looks good except for Ilya. He looks pretty good. That’s really funny. I’ve heard from people that that may not … Yeah, I don’t know if that’s entirely true, but … Yeah, but whatever. This is a movie that Amazon wanted to make. They make it, and then all of a sudden in February, it’s announced that they have a 0 up front. All they had to do was commit to spending 15 million to release it in theaters, which is what the filmmaker wanted. Amazon is essentially eating the rest of the cost with the hope that it will become a big box office hit and they will recoup their money, and they did that to get out of this situation, to not have a problem with Sam Altman. How unprecedented is that? I mean, that is corporate censorship. That is lighting money on fire. That is some real cowardice on the part of Amazon, among other things. That sounds insane to me, but you know this world so much better than I do. How weird is it that that all happened? It's rare. There was a miniseries about 15 years ago called The Kennedys that was critical of the Kennedy family and was going to be released by A&E, which is half-owned by Disney, and had some connections to the Kennedys, and they voiced their displeasure about it. And that miniseries was offloaded to the Reelz channel, which is an independent cable channel owned by a kind of conservative rich guy. So that’s an example where that happened. And there's examples all the time where studios just won't touch material because of how hot-button it is. A perfect example was last year, or two years ago, with The Apprentice, the Donald Trump movie. That was a movie that got a lot of good reviews at Cannes. It wasn't considered great. It was considered good. And the traditional studios just decided that it wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth poking Donald Trump and having a problem for their company. If they did this movie it may find an audience, it may not. It might get some Oscar nominations. It ended up getting two big Oscar nominations for a very tiny distributor, Briarcliff, that had no problem doing this. But that's an example of the studios kind of self-censoring up front. But it's very rare to make a movie and then dump it. Can Hollywood still take shots at the tech industry? Can they still cover it, or offer versions of those stories with integrity, given how much tech money is now in the industry itself? It’s a fascinating question. I mean, we’re going to get an answer this fall. Sony is releasing The Social Reckoning, which is Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to [The Social Network](https://www.wired.com/story/social-network-right-all-along/), and it’s based on the [Facebook Files](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039). That is a very critical story about Mark Zuckerberg. When I interviewed Sorkin, he explicitly connected it to [January 6th](https://www.wired.com/story/january-6-committee-final-report-key-takeaways/). You know, it’s not completely about that, but he makes a direct connection between the decisions that Facebook makes to focus on content that enrages people and divides people to the events of January 6th. So that’s going to be something that I think will be controversial, and Sony is releasing that movie. Now, Sony doesn’t have a streaming service. Sony is a Japanese company. They also were not one of the companies that settled with Donald Trump. I mean, if you look at what [Paramount Skydance](https://www.wired.com/story/paramount-refused-to-air-an-ad-criticizing-its-merger-with-warner-bros/) has done, they’ve openly courted Trump. You look at Disney with the ABC News settlement with George Stephanopoulos. They paid Trump, I believe it was 15, $16 million. Those companies were just not even interested in this kind of material. But it’s a great question going forward: How willing is Hollywood going to be to take on the tech industry, either its big moguls or the industry in general. You’ve done some coverage about astroturfed movie hype. You talked to Lane Brown, who wrote a great piece for New York magazine on this subject. This is the fact that the popularity and virality of movies and TV shows is increasingly manufactured and engineered to seem authentic on social media. You talked earlier about social media becoming increasingly saturated with AI content, so it’s really hard to figure out what’s real and what’s fake. It’s also really hard to figure out what is authentically good or getting authentic buzz and what is just being paid for by a marketing firm to go viral. I was curious if you could talk a little bit more about your understanding of that, and if you could offer some advice about how to tell whether something is good anymore. Amazing question. My rule is: Trust nothing. Trust nothing. I did a column about that issue, and I talked to Lane, and I did a pod about it as well, and I had so many of these viral marketers reach out to me saying, “Hey dude, why didn’t you talk to me? I’m pumping out hundreds of thousands of positive and negative tweets every week on this subject. I could’ve told you exactly how I do it.” They’re not shy about it. If you’re interested in what the new Spider-Man movie is and whether it’s good, and you go on social media, chances are the tweet you see will be paid for. It’s not like that’s an entirely new thing, going all the way back to the beginning of Hollywood and the publicity departments putting out positive stories about the actors and things like that. But what’s different now is that the algorithms are designed to amplify this kind of content, because the savvy marketers know how to game them and how to include the right words and how to be over the top, and your feeds will be filled up. If you are the kind of person who is interested in Spider-Man content, your feed will be filled up with this kind of stuff. Both positive and negative. There can be a campaign against a particular actor or movie. The Odyssey stuff is a perfect example. Elon decided he didn’t like it, so it encouraged this whole cottage industry of trolls to whip up anti-Odyssey sentiment. Now, it turns out it didn’t work, and the film was able to overcome that, but a lot of films are not able to overcome that. My rule is trust nothing, but that’s sort of an easy cop-out. What do you trust? I go to Metacritic. OK. If you look at the real reviewers on Metacritic—Rotten Tomatoes is sort of garbage now. Well, you wrote about PR firms paying critics to artificially boost scores on Rotten Tomatoes, right? Yeah, Rotten Tomatoes has much more—they would argue inclusive, I would argue democratic—approach to critics. Anyone can be a critic, basically, on Rotten Tomatoes. They have a process to get there, but it’s a lot of people that are, quote-unquote, “awards journalists,” and that means you are pumping up movies to get interviews with the stars. Metacritic does a better job, I think, of weeding that stuff out, and they also have a 1-to-100 scale. So the thumbs up, thumbs down metric of Rotten Tomatoes is really reductive, because it doesn’t catch the nuance of a review, and often reviews that are mostly negative will be determined to be positive because there’s one line in it that says, you know, “Tom Holland is great,” and that’s what they blurb, and that’s what the review is counted as. I do use Metacritic, and most of all I don’t trust the buzz on social media at all. A lot of times you’ll see “first reactions” of a movie. Those are all sycophants. Those are bloggers and people and influencers who are invited to a premiere with the expectation that they fawn over the movie afterwards. Then the trade media picks up on those first reactions and pumps them out as if the movie is amazing. Go look at the first reactions to, like, Supergirl or He-Man or these movies that totally bombed. The first reactions were amazing, because those are the influencers that are essentially paid to be there and treated like kings, and they put out these social media responses that then get aggregated to create a narrative that the studio wants. Critics are better than that, but even the aggregate critic score, these influencers with agendas make it into those critic scores these days. So you can’t even trust Rotten Tomatoes. A sad day when we can’t even trust Rotten Tomatoes with our film reviews. That is very disappointing. My husband still uses it all the time. I’m going to have to go home and tell him it’s over. Metacritic is better. Not perfect, but better. How to Listen You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how: If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. 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