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Foreign.
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Welcome back to the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. My name is Sonny Bunch, I'm culture editor at the Bulwark and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal. He is an entertainment industry reporter over there. Got a couple of them. I was listening to one of your colleagues on the town this week talking about another kind of angle, another facet of what we're going to be discussing here today. But the reason that I wanted to get you on the show was to talk about a piece that you had this week, a nice exclusive about A24, the indie studio A24, teaming up with Google on some AI stuff. This touches on a lot of different kind of things that are going on in the industry right now. Like I said, we'll get to those in a second. But what's the deal? So what's going on with a 24 and Google?
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Yeah, so they have made a pretty unusual partnership where A24 is going to work with DeepMind, which is the AI research unit of Google, to develop new AI tools. Basically A24 is going to try to bring in the filmmakers that they work with to collaborate with DeepMind and see if they can come up with ways that AI can help with storyboarding, pre visualization, visual effects, touch ups, things nobody's thought of yet to make filmmaking better. Better. But they're very, they have a very hard line. Google's not going to get access to any of A24's data. They're not going to be like training a model on, you know, on Marty supreme and backrooms or whatever. And also as part of the deal, Google is investing $75 million into a 24, which is obviously a pretty tiny amount of money for Google, but it's meaningful. This is the first time it's ever put money directly into a studio
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in, and I, you know this is, it's a lot of money for a 24. I mean not, you know, they, they've been raising money kind of continuously. I think they were valued at $3.5 billion a couple years back after an investment from Thrive. So they are, you know, they're, they're always, they're they're always looking for stuff and they're, they are, this is just, this is kind of unrelated, but they are also making a 175 million dollar Elden ring as adaptation which suggests that they do need some, some, some capital here. But what, what. All right, so let's, let's actually talk about what the, the tools are here. Because I think when people hear AI in filmmaking, they think gener, generative AI. They think, like I put in, I want to see Spider man punch Superman in, you know, the, the plagiarism box, and then it shows up on there on their laptop. Yeah, but that is not, that's not what's going on here, right?
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Correct. So when the tools are made entirely by people in the tech world, that's what they generally come up with, is type in what you want and it magically creates a movie. And often we've seen those models end up creating things that look suspiciously, suspiciously like things that have already been created by humans in Hollywood. And when the Chinese model Sea Dance first hit the world several months ago, we really saw some pretty amazing examples of that. That's not what a 24 wants to do, and that's not what most filmmakers want to do. Most filmmakers are, of course, horrified by this idea that you just type in a few words and get something that sort of resembles a movie but has no soul to it. So the idea here is, can we create tools that would be actually valuable to filmmakers to let them do things that they can't do now? To let them, to let their. To let their creative process like, be more effective and more efficient? I mean, the, the analogy someone who I spoke to at DeepMind used was AlphaFold. Now, obviously, filmmaking is not curing cancer, but in the sense that they worked with doctors and medical researchers to try to develop tools that would actually enhance medical research, not take it over. Right. And that, that's what they want to do now. And they're, they're. One point they made to me over and over, people at A24 and DeepMind is they don't know exactly what these tools are going to be, but they actually want to start collaborating to figure out what they can be because they don't. They know what they don't want it to be. They don't want it to be Sea Dance. They don't want it to be type in a prompt and get a movie.
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B
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. You know, this is a thing I talk about on my various shows. The kind of evolving idea of what, like, what the term AI even really means in, in a lot of these conversations because, you know, is machine learning that helps speed up CGI AI. Does that, does that count? Like, does it. You know, and, and there was a, there was another, you know, kind of little, little fight about this a couple weeks ago when Martin Scorsese announced a partnership with an AI firm to essentially to Do a part of what it sounds like Google and A24 will be doing here, working on storyboards, that sort of thing. Yeah, which, which is interesting.
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Yeah. Yes. That's a very obvious, like that's something sitting right in front of us. Like because storyboards, pre visualization, that's not really the ultimate creative work. That's something that you do that helps you figure out what you want the creative work to be. And AI, and it can be rough. It doesn't have to look great. Right. And it doesn't have to have soul to it because not meant for the world to see. So that's one of the most obvious examples of something that AI can do. But what, you know, what else could it do that would really enhance creativity? You know, I think what way24 and Google are betting on is there's things nobody's thought of. Hopefully there's things it can do that really will help artists.
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Yeah. And again we, you know, it's, I should have mentioned this at the start of the show. Ben wrote a book, came out 2018 18, called the Big Picture the Fight for the Future of Movies. Which you know, like you probably, well, if it came out in 2018, you probably finished it right around 2017, which means it's been about 10 years now. Which means, yeah, the entire future of film is, is, has changed since then. But I, but I, but it's, it's a really great overview of where things kind of stood in in the 2010s, right before this big tech boomed. But as streaming was starting to take off before COVID you know, kind of shut everything down and everybody funneled into that. So I would recommend just, just reading it for, for some good background knowledge there. But like I was sitting here, I was just sitting here sketching out all of the ways the different major, and many major studios have been messing around with AI and tech more broadly. And it's, it like I can't, I, I have trouble finding a studio that's not doing something.
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Okay.
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Right now it's, it's pretty wild.
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Well, it's like yes and no. That's the weird thing. Like everybody has announced deals of, of some kind or tests or experiments, strategic partnerships. But yet I will say when you talk to the filmmakers, when you talk to the production studios, how are you using AI in your processes? The answers are usually minimal at best. Just to give one telling example, I did a story in March on about Pixar and I went up there, I spoke to Pete Docter, the chief creative officer. I mean that's like CGI animation seems like an obvious place where AI could be helpful and could make the process faster and, or cheaper and they're not using it at all. So I think a lot of the studios are definitely making moves, but yet filmmakers working at a professional level are not using it very much. Yet. There's, there is still like a lot of opportunity here that we may see in, in, in the future.
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Well, and there's also, I mean, look, I, I think part of the reason that they are so emphatic about not using it, right, is that there is, there is still a stigma attached to it. There is still a, you know, people saying, hey, we don't want, we don't want AI replacing workers. We don't want AI replacing the creative process. Right? Like, this is our, this is our special sauces, the people. Which, you know, I think is, I, I'm an AI. I'm much more AI skeptical myself than a lot of my friends, a lot of my, my, you know, fellow travelers. So I, I, I am, you know, I get wary about this sort of thing. Um, but it does, it does kind of feel like on the edges at least some of these, you know, again, like storyboarding or, or previs or whatever is. It does feel like there could at least be some use there that is not wholly, I don't know, anathema to folks.
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Yeah, it's not going to replace, yes, that doesn't replace creators. I mean, I think there is like a very optimistic, positive future people could be seeing, which is where AI does replace a lot of the work on a film that's not the most creative. And there's a lot of stuff that you do in the film that's not like purely like somebody with a vision doing creative work. And if AI can make all that get done faster and cheaper, then it should let creative people make what they want at a much lower cost. And when things cost less, you get more stuff and you get more creative, risky stuff. So we could just see more films and TV shows getting made and we could see stuff that's a lot riskier than when the big studios play it safe.
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This is the James Cameron argument, right? He says, I want to, instead of taking seven years to make an Avatar movie, I'll be able to make two in three years. And that will speed things along.
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Yes, that, that, that is the optimistic case and I think it's quite possible. But the transition to get there is obviously quite rough. And you know, there's people, middle aged people have been working in Hollywood For a while. Who. Their livelihood depends on the way things have been done. And also the processes they built up are all human processes from beginning to end. And disrupting those processes is very. It's a very difficult thing to do. I mean, obviously, we know this is true in all sorts of businesses whenever. Whenever a new technology comes along.
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Yeah, yeah. All right, so let's just run through some of the other companies here, because I do one thing, I wanted this to kind of serve, as I mentioned in the email, like a. Kind of like a talk to me, like I'm stupid. Run through of the. Of where we are with some of these companies and their relationships to tech and AI. Right. Because it is pretty. Again, it's pretty expansive. So, like, for instance, Netflix and their partnership with. Or, well, they bought like, Ben Affleck's AI company. What. What was that? What was. What did that deal look like? What was Netflix hoping to get out of that?
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So that it's a very specific AI tool which things that seem like it could be helpful. It's this tool where you. The AI creates like a small model based just on that movie. So, and it's for work and post production at the end. So you shoot a movie and then you basically put all of that footage, all the scripts, all information you have on that movie, you put into a new. A new bespoke AI model. And then if you need to touch up the movie, if you need to do some reshoots afterward, sometimes it'll do it for you. Like a lot of movies get made. And then. And then people realize, oh, shoot, like, this scene doesn't make sense. Like, we need. We need to have just sunny saying this one line, right? Or if we could just get a different angle on this, that. On these two people talking that we didn't get that day, you would flow so much better. And now if you realize that if you want to do it, you have to spend a lot of money to get your cast and crew back together and hope, get into the same location. And that it's very logistically difficult and it can cost easily millions of dollars. And this AI company Ben Affleck started promises to be able to do that digitally with generative AI. So you could. You could, you. You could kind of create a shot that you weren't able to get on set,
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keeping understanding that you are not, you know, sitting there in front of the computer, working on watching, watching these things roll out. The way I have been kind of led to understand how this works is that more or less can create the image you want, but using, again, like, as you say, using the footage kind of that has already been shot as, as training, like, to. So it's not pulling from. It's not. It's not like we're not recreating a shot from Superman. Right? We are using this footage that we've got here. And we're just going to, you know, the, the. The computer will show the face, you know, in shot, reverse shot, instead of, you know, coverage.
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Yes, exactly. Right. That's exactly what it can do. So when they make the RIP2, you can just use all the footage from the RIP2 to. To get a different angle on Ben Affleck's face than they actually managed to get on set or whatever.
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Yeah. Okay. All right, then. Let's see. There was. There was the Disney OpenAI deal that involved. So this is now defunct. My understanding is Disney and. And OpenAI that has fallen through. But Disney basically said to OpenAI, like, okay, you can use our stuff. You can use our stuff to train Sora. Or is that wrong?
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No, it would not. To train, basically, they said. So remember, like, Sora launched last summer, the consumer app. And it was immediately like a copyright violation fiasco. And you. And then pretty quickly, OpenAI agreed under pressure. Okay, we're going to put in restrictions, so you cannot generate a video with Homer Simpson or Darth Vader or the Minions or whatever. Then a few months later, Disney announced a deal with OpenAI that said, okay, actually, you are going to be able to use some Disney characters only. Only animated ones are ones like Darth Vader with a mask, like, not ones that are based on real human actors, because that introduces all sorts of union rule issues and payment issues. But obviously, Disney completely owns the image of Mickey Mouse and Homer Simpson and so on. So they were going to let you make videos with them. And then in exchange, Disney was going to be able to put some of those videos onto Disney. They were going to. It was sort of vaguely determined, like, work with OpenAI and some new tools. And Disney was going to get a $1 billion stake essentially in OpenAI. That was the terms of the deal. And then in March, OpenAI, for completely unrelated reasons, decided to shut down Sora. Like, the consumer app wasn't actually doing very well, and OpenAI, of course, has a very limited amount of compute and money to throw at problems. And it decided that, you know, video generation was not a priority compared to trying to compete with Anthropic for, you know, for corporate business and coding and that kind of thing. So they shut down Sora and they just called Disney and were like, actually, it's over. Like this whole thing you were counting on to be the linchpin of your AI strategy, like it doesn't matter to us. So we've shut it down. So long. Good luck.
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Yeah. And the sense I get is that Disney is still interested in doing something with AI, but they haven't figured out precisely what yet.
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Yes. Which is true of most of the major studios. Like, you know, I've talked to Josh d', Amaro, the CEO of Disney about this and he says generally that AI is important and they, you know, it can enhance creativity and make the processes more efficient, blah, blah, blah, but they haven't figured out what they're going to do. I, my sense is after, you know, this OpenAI thing was a total black eye for them. Like it made them look dumb to have made this partnership make a big announcement out of it and then have it collapse. So I suspect they're not going to want to do another splashy big announcement partnership like that. And they don't not tie themselves so hard to one company and they're going to try to do things a little quieter and perhaps work with numerous partners.
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Yeah, we're going to come back to OpenAI in a minute because there is, there's another kind of newsy thing happening with them and a movie studio. Some, some controversy, maybe nontroversy, I don't know over there, but. All right, so let's see then there's, there's Paramount and Warner Brothers, which I think we can think about in tandem since Paramount Skydance is purchasing Warner Brothers. Looks like that deal is probably going to go through. And of course the, the real, the real entity backing this whole thing is Oracle, which is, is a giant tech platform platform. But like, it's not clear to me that outside of promises that Paramount is going to, you know, use the Oracle technology to, you know, make the apps better and make their workflow better. And you know, they're going to combine, they're going to combine cloud storage to, you know, create redundancies and what. But it's, it's not actually 100% clear to me what they are doing on this side of things. On the, on the kind of like tech, AI side of things. It almost like it's weirdly kind of a black box right now.
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Yes, they've, they've, they've generally talked about trying to use Oracle cloud tech to drive efficiencies because they need to find ways to save money when they merge These companies, but what will that specifically mean and how, what role will AI play? They have been vague, so I think it's actually a big question of like, are they going to come in really aggressively and try to use tech to overhaul the process or is this kind of all talk to try to convince their investors and their lenders that they, that they know something special the other studios don't. And then in practice they're just going to be trying to make good movies and hoping that they're hit box office. And they don't have any, you know, they don't have any actually sharper insights and plans than that. The table tbd, you know, and I think the ultimate question, right, will be like, do they build like a modern next, you know, next generation movie studio or does David Ellison just want to like, does he just want to like run a studio and because he's the son of a billionaire, he's going to get to do it?
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Yeah, again, it just feels like it, like for, for all of this talk about, you know, tech and everything else, it is the one that feels like there's least going on. But then I, you know, we, again, like you look at Apple, Apple Studios is another one where Apple Studios is making lots of things and they're making things that aren't cheap. And you know, Apple is a company, Apple is a company that actually has been kind of, I would not say on the outside looking in of AI, but they have also been a little bit slower to adopt than some of the other tech companies. Am I, am I, I'm, I feel like I'm reading that basically right.
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Yeah, 100%. If anything, you're being generous. I mean, their efforts to make themselves a player on their own terms on AI have gone nowhere. Right. Like Siri is, Siri is fine, but it does not, you know, doesn't remotely compare to like what ChatGPT or Gemini can do. And at this point, you know, it appears clear that Apple is going to end up being a good host platform. You know, their devices will be a great host platform to use various AI and they'll work with partners on it, but they're, they're not a leader in creating AI models themselves. And to my knowledge that, you know, that it speaks to that, that they haven't like attempted to use AI in any meaningful way in Apple Studios productions at all. Which is, you know, which is a notable difference from, from Amazon, which I assume may be on your list.
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B
Yeah, well, let's, all right, let's get to, let's get to Amazon because this is where, this is where the other big kind of story of the last week has, has come from, which is the, you know, some background here. Amazon. MGM has a long standing relationship with the filmmaker Luca Guadino. He's made films for other people, but he's made, I think three or four of his last four or five movies for Amazon, mgm. He came to them with a script that was about the, the, the rise of OpenAI. Basically the moment in OpenAI where they, the board tried to remove Sam Altman and over the course of a weekend that got reversed. And you know, it's been described a little bit like the social network, but for AI instead of social media. So Amazon, MGM has put $40 million into this movie. They've, they've shot it. It's shot. They screened a rough cut of it and then said, actually we're not going to distribute this movie. We're not going to distribute it, we're going to try and give it to some, we're going to try and sell it to somebody else, we'll help you find another distributor for it, you know, blah, blah, blah. But we're not going to put this movie out. Now there's some backstory here which is that Amazon itself, I think invested 75 or $80 billion or something, you know,
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AWS, their Amazon web services has a deal worth tens of billions of dollars with OpenAI. Yes.
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Okay, so, but, so this is the, the theory here then is that the, the relationship with OpenAI for Amazon is too valuable to put out a movie of this sort. So they are trying to offload it and if they can't, it's going to be a real question of what happens to it. Like what happens to this movie if they cannot find another distributor for it. It.
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That is all correct, I will say. I want to make clear that I do not know for certain why Amazon decided it's not going to release this movie. Obviously it is true. They have this huge deal with OpenAI. The other thing I will just throw in, which is true, is that I have spoken to people at other studios who have screened the movie and with the, with the idea of should we buy this? And I've heard from several people that in their estimation it's not very good and they, they are choosing not to buy it, not because they're worried about the. Any fallout, but because they don't think they make money on it. So this doesn't mean that Amazon is not also taking into account other business considerations. But just keep in mind that at least some people think the movie is not good and doesn't have a lot of commercial potential. But yeah, it obviously has a lot of people in Hollywood scared that, you know, that as big tech, one way or another takes over the entertainment industry, that these much more economically significant relationships are going to impact creativity and artistic freedom, especially if people want to make creative work that deals with big tech and its impact in our society. And obviously it's one of the most important cultural questions of our time. And one would hope that art can, can address that stuff in provocative ways. And if it can't, or if it has a tougher time, that will certainly, it'll certainly be sad for the American entertainment industry.
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Well, I want to drill down on this a little bit because it does feel like the kind of overarching idea here, which is that, look, tech is where all the money is. And traditionally what happens with movie studios, particularly since the end of the mogul era, since the brothers Warner and Mayer and the rest, they got out of the business and these studios started passing from corporation to corporation generation, what, what ends up happening is a company with a lot of money that has, you know, an affinity for movies, buys these things and plays with them for a little bit and then sells them to somebody else. And it does feel like we are in a moment where all. There's so much money in tech right now. I mean, Apple's a trillion dollar company. You know, they have their own studio. Amazon is an enormous company. They have their own studio. You know, there's, there's talk about, you know, I saw somebody joke that OpenAI could just buy a movie studio with the money in their couch and, you know, and kill this thing. And so that sort of, that sort of purchasing power does seem like the, I don't know, like, like a way, a thing to worry about if you are worried about this very specific thing, which is actual freedom of artistic movement. Yeah.
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A
And I think what you're pointing at, the broader topic that is scary to people in the entertainment industry is that most companies now are not in entertainment primarily to make money from that entertainment. Right. Amazon makes entertainment to keep people subscribed to Amazon Prime. Right. That's why, that's, that's, that's the main reason why they do it. Apple. It's to get people subscribing to Apple one and using Apple tv. Disney makes more money from their theme parks now than they do from movies or tv. And you could argue that the greatest benefit of Disney successful movies is the money that it helps them make. From toy sales and from theme park visits and so on. This. So when people don't consider entertainment to be the most important thing they're doing, then they're willing to compromise that entertainment for other incentives that are more meaningful to them. You know, and that's scary. I mean, just like, yes, what's happening to artificial now, like, is worrisome to people, but it points to, there's this bigger issue of like Amazon could just shut down Amazon's prime video tomorrow. Like they could just get out of the business entirely and their stock probably wouldn't move one penny. Right, right. I mean that's, that's, yeah, it could. Yes.
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Yeah, the. I, I joke. But I, you know, one of the, one of the, it's funny. I was going back and reading the portion in your book that's about the founding of Amazon Studios because it was this, I remember when Amazon Studios started making movies and they put out a movie by Spike Lee and a movie by Whit Stillman and they're putting out, you know, they were putting out like very good, kind of independent minded, you know, entertaining, well made pictures. And, and it was nice to have that, that sort of new player in that space. And you know, you could you just go read how Ted Hope has spent the last, you know, five or six years since leaving Amazon. He's not, he's not thrilled by, by anything that's happening, but it's, it is, it's, it's, it's just, it is this, it's this it. Boy, what am I trying to say here? There was this real glimmer of, of like, hey, this could be a fun, exciting new thing. And now it just feels like it's all getting, everything is just getting ready to be data for the data companies.
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A
Yes. I mean, at the beak. So what you're pointing to is when Amazon first got into movies, they were acting like they were the new Miramax or something. They were making primarily kind of low to mid budget indie style auteur movies. And as they've grown, I would say they've become more mainstream. I mean they're, it's not like they're making just a bunch of IP driven crap. Although they did just release the he man movie, which arguably was that. But you know, they made Project Hail Mary which was based on a book but like very well liked, very well reviewed, extremely successful. They've, they made, they make a wide variety of movies but they're no longer like trying, aspiring to be the next Miramax. They're aspiring to be the Next, Warner Brothers or Universal is, is where they are. And there, there is a. There's certainly a lot less energy in the indie festival, politically provocative part of the movie business than there was 10, 20, certainly 30 years ago, like at its peak in the 1990s. Like that business is a, Is a fraction of what it was. And even the indie studios like A24 and Neon really make most of their money now from horror movies.
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B
Right, right. I mean, just look at Obsession in backrooms. I mean, it's funny, there was a, There was a chart in your, in your piece about the, the deal with, with Google that we, that we started this episode talking about that just looks at the, the highest grossing A24 films of all time. And this is, this is a thing I already knew because I am like obsessed with a 24 box office. I find it to be a fascinating company and also like punching way above its weight in terms of cultural cachet versus, you know, actual, actual success. But the, But Back Rooms is the highest grossing A24 film of all time by an enormous margin, more so than Marty supreme, which was its, its, its previous number one. And then you, you know, you go back a little bit. That Civil War a couple years ago, which was a little more expensive and then, you know, but backrooms cost $10 million and it's grossed almost 300 million. I think it's right around.
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It's over 300 and it's still going.
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Yeah, so like that, that. And that does, you know, Obsession, of course, is another one. That's Focus Features and Universal Comcast, but, you know, same basic story there. Focus buys out for $13 million and it's, you know, going to end up probably going to end up grossing 400 million worldwide. Some crazy numbers, some just enormous, enormous amount of money. And always, you know, that's always nice to see. But it definitely, it is, It's a limited slice of what film can be. I say that as somebody who loves horror films. I look for. But, you know. Right.
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100. That's great. But you. Yes, we. If you love film, you want to see the widest possible variety of movies getting made. And if you want that, then the business models behind them need to work. And I would say right now the business model of horror works, the business model of tentpole event movies works. It works enough to certainly keep the studios to keep doing it. But the business model for like the Spike Lee movie that you just mentioned, you know, like, it's very hard to make money on a Spike Lee movie these days. Take an Obvious example.
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B
Yeah. All right, so let me. Well, let me ask one real quick question here that may actually end up being a fairly long question. So you wrote the Big Picture. Again, this came out, let's say you wrote it almost 10 years ago. Let's say. Let's just. For saying how. How. What if you were writing a sequel to that. If you're writing a sequel to the Big Picture, you know, the fight for the future of movies. Right? That was the subtitle. We are in the future of movies. It's ten years later. How. What does. What does the last. What does the story of the last 10 years look like?
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A
It's looks like things. I would. I mean, the broad scope I would say, is things got very scary and very depressing. And now we're just in a moment where there was a glimmer of hope again. The, you know, 2020, 2021. You saw simultaneously, right, the shutdown of movie theaters and every. Every major studio launching their own streaming service to try to compete with Netflix. So it really, really got people out of the habit of going to theaters because you didn't. First you couldn't, and then you didn't have to. Studios were putting so much stuff online in order to try and boost the growth of Disney and hbo, Max and so on. Remember, they were putting tons of movies that were originally going to be made for theaters onto streaming at that time. So why would people go to theaters? And there was really a worry that movie theaters were going to become, like, going to the Broadway, you know, going to Broadway or the opera or something. And we have been consistently below the box office of the 2010s, and every type of movie, with the exception of horror has been really challenged. The big franchises have been sputtering. At the time I wrote that book, it seemed like Marvel, Fast and Furious, Transformers, they were just unbeatable. Like, every single one grossed, like a billion dollars, regardless of how good they were. Frankly, that stopped working in the 2020s. You start to see Marvel have a bunch of flops. Fast and Furious has lost speed and no pun intended and so on. And so there really was this existential crisis of, like, people are just not going to go to the movies as much as they used to. Right? But the thing that's gotten people excited is that young people will turn out and for certain films, and they actually will turn out for things that feel more authentic and real, made by humans. So like. Like Sinners was, you know, this huge, exciting success story for people in Hollywood. And now this year, seeing Obsession in backrooms. Like, those are not. Those are not franchise movies at all. Those are not hits anybody could predict. And so there is this. There is this hope. There is this hope. There is this hope that we are entering an era like the 70s, when the stuff that used to work is not resonating with young audiences. And therefore, we will see a lot more experimentation and we will see a lot more originality, and we will see a lot more auteurs, frankly, making their mark and changing the business. So that's got people excited. And I would say it's the first real optimism I've seen in Hollywood since the pandemic.
- [33:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, that does feel about right. It does feel like things have maybe turned a corner. I don't know. I mean, obviously the big story of that period was the rise of streaming and how that changed not just distribution patterns, but also what was getting made, which, you know, I think we're still. And this. And look, that also ties into all this tech talk, right? Like the. The streaming. The streaming boom is one of the big reasons that we have or having this conversation about, you know, who is watching what and all the Data and
- [34:17]
A
everything 100 and the streaming bust we're going through now when the services are all making a lot less content, primarily a lot less television, is, I think, just one more reason why the movies have a little bit more life to them. Because there you actually can't just sit at home and feel like, I have an endless amount of stuff to watch. At least as far as premium content, which was the way you did it in 2021, when nobody could possibly even keep up with every new thing popping up on streaming services.
- [34:42]
B
Yeah. All right. Well, I always like to close these interviews by asking if there's anything I should have asked if you think there's anything folks should know. What did we. What did we not discuss about technology and Hollywood or really just anything else that we should have. We should have talked about.
- [35:00]
A
Let's see. I would. I would just say that, you know, we haven't really talked about how the, you know, the relationship of, you know, social media and short and social video to Hollywood. And it's this in really interesting tension where on the one hand, like, yes, it is obviously a massive source of competition and distraction, and people are getting a lot of their entertainment that way. But now, because, frankly, because of backroom obsession and iron lung, maybe the YouTuber Markiplier, people in Hollywood are really hopeful that it can. It can be like the new comic books. It can be a place where you actually find material and you find talent and you bring them to movies. And that it can, there can be, there can be a symbiosis between the two rather than pure competition. And we'll see whether or not this is the beginning of a real meaningful trend or if this was like a weird blip that it just happened. But that is something that is hopeful for Hollywood, that they're not just gonna. That, that like Gen Z is not just staring at their phones constantly and therefore won't go to the movies. That maybe they'll get off their phone if you, if you are making stuff in the movies that's relevant to what they're seeing on their phones.
- [36:21]
B
Well, and that's the other part of this. I mean, you mentioned the talent and the ip, for lack of a better word, but also the audience, like bringing that audience back to the theaters 100%.
- [36:32]
A
I mean, I see this. I know this is a cliche to be like my kid, but I've had this experience for the past year that's hard to miss. Like, I have a 14 year old and he, for him, culture is primarily like YouTube and video games. That's what culture means to him. And when that stuff has migrated to movies, it's meaningful to him. Like he, it's where, like, when does he get genuinely excited without me telling him anything about a movie? In the past year, it's been five nights at Freddy's, it's been Minecraft, it's been Iron Lung, it's been backrooms. Like, those are things he's gotten independently excited about because it's, it's based on culture that is meaningful to him. And obviously culture to him is what's on his PC.
- [37:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, that all, that all tracks. That all tracks. Ben, thank you so much for being on today. I really appreciate it.
- [37:21]
A
Sure, Sonny, My pleasure.
- [37:23]
B
And again, my name is Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bulwark. And I'll be back next week with another episode of the Bull. Work goes to Holly. See you.