The AI Label: Hollywood's Latest Magic Word for Funding
There’s something deeply cynical happening in Hollywood right now, and it’s making me wonder whether we’ve learned anything from the past two decades of tech hype cycles.
Roger Avary, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction, recently revealed that after struggling to get traditional films funded, he started an AI production company and suddenly had investors throwing money at him. Three films in production, just like that. His quote really drives it home: “Just put AI in front of it and all of a sudden you’re in production on three features.”
Now, I’ve spent enough years working in IT to recognize a hype cycle when I see one. The pattern is depressingly familiar. In 1999, you just needed “.com” in your company name to attract venture capital. Then it was “Web 2.0,” followed by blockchain and cryptocurrency. Each time, investors with more money than technical understanding threw cash at anything with the magic buzzword attached, regardless of whether the technology actually added value to the product.
But here’s what really frustrates me about this particular cycle: we’re talking about art and storytelling. Film is fundamentally a human creative endeavor, and the idea that slapping “AI” on a project makes it more fundable than a traditional screenplay from an Oscar-nominated writer is genuinely bonkers.
What caught my attention in the discussion around this story was someone pointing out that we’re already seeing this play out. Remember that “Wizard of Oz remastered with AI” that made headlines? Workers on that project later revealed that AI played a minimal role, but it was the headline that mattered. The AI label was purely for marketing and investor appeal.
This is where my DevOps background makes me particularly skeptical. I’ve seen too many projects where “AI” or “machine learning” gets thrown around in pitch decks, but when you look under the hood, it’s either basic automation that’s been around for decades, or it’s such a minor component that calling the entire project “AI-driven” is misleading at best.
The environmental implications worry me too. Training large AI models requires enormous amounts of energy and water for cooling data centers. If we’re going to be using AI in film production, I’d hope it’s because it genuinely improves the process or enables creative possibilities that weren’t available before – not just because it’s a trendy label that opens wallets.
Someone in the discussion speculated that companies like OpenAI are pumping money into these deals, and honestly, that makes a lot of sense. They need proof-of-concept projects to justify their own astronomical valuations. The returns aren’t the films themselves – they’re the marketing value of being able to say “AI is transforming Hollywood.”
There’s a bubble here, and it’s going to pop. The question is how much damage it’ll do when it does. Will we end up with a bunch of mediocre films that used AI as a gimmick? Will genuine innovations in AI-assisted filmmaking get tarred with the same brush as the snake oil merchants? And what happens to the traditional filmmakers who can’t get funding because investors are too busy chasing the next shiny tech trend?
Look, I’m fascinated by what AI can do. I follow the developments closely, probably spend too much time listening to podcasts about it. There are legitimate applications in film production – automated color correction, dialogue cleanup, even helping with visual effects work. But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool and using “AI” as a fundraising strategy.
What we need is more transparency. If a project is genuinely using AI in meaningful ways, great – tell us how. But if you’re just using it as a buzzword to attract investors while doing traditional filmmaking with maybe 5% AI involvement, that’s dishonest, and it poisons the well for everyone.
The optimist in me wants to believe that some good films will come out of this funding frenzy, AI or not. Roger Avary did co-write Pulp Fiction, after all. Maybe he’ll use this opportunity to make something genuinely interesting, regardless of how much AI is actually involved. But the pragmatist in me, the one who’s seen tech bubble after tech bubble, knows that most of this money will be wasted on projects that wouldn’t have been funded on their merits alone.
We’re at a weird moment where the label matters more than the substance, where “AI film production company” opens more doors than “experienced screenwriter with proven track record.” It won’t last forever, but while it does, I hope at least some of that money goes toward people who’ll use it to tell worthwhile stories, whatever tools they end up using to tell them.