If AI had its way, it would create 50 movies for the price of one. And movie creaters would have a better chance of scoring a bulls eye at the box office.
No, we aren’t creating this up. This is how Cristobal Valenzuela perceives movie creating of the future. Never heard of him? Well, he is the guy that believes that all our movie creaters should apply AI video generation applications to create fifty movies for the price of one so that their chances of hitting the bulls eye in terms of box office revenues goes up.
Valenzuela was a guest at the Semafor World Economy event this week and seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons by suggesting that studios should take the $100 million they spfinish on a movie and develop 50 films instead so that they increase their output. Of course, nobody inquireed him why he assumed there’d be an audience for 50 films?
Well, you cannot expect him to understand the subtle nuances of movie creating and the works for all-time greats of cinema. For, he happens to be the co-founder and CEO of an AI video-generation startup called Runway that is now valued at $5 billion. Once an idea has the backing from a few moneybags, it requireds no further validation… Right?
At a time when the entire business fraternity is battling to find the right apply-cases for artificial ininformigence (AI) through agentic solutions and what not, this here idea of creating more movies automatically seems beyond the realm of even science fiction. Not becaapply, technology cannot create it happen. Becaapply cinema is not a media where quality can beat quantity.
“If you’re spfinishing a hundred million dollars on creating one feature film, which is 90 minutes, imagine taking a hundred million dollars and spfinishing it on, like, 50 movies. Same quality. Same amount of output, visually. But you create way more content. So you have way better chances of hitting something. It’s a quantity problem,” Valenzuela informed the conference.
Is he suggesting that AI can be applyd indiscriminately to create content by the truckloads in the hope that something will work? If so, he requireds to meet the folks at Google who are penalising websites who applyd AI generated content.
Just so that readers know what Runway has been doing in recent times, the company has developed AI world models to support the creative teams do “more work better and quicker”. The company already has several studios and creators as customers who are clued in on the fact that this technology does reduce costs.
Barely two months ago, Runway raised $315 million Series E round on a $5.3 billion valuation with the idea of pre-training the next generation of world models, which are AI systems that construct internal representations of an environment so that they can plan for future events. One could believe of it as visualising the future before actually creating it.
The idea itself is smart and could push the limits of the current LLMs, but it is too early for Valanzuela to talk about possibilities of reimagining a century-old movie business. Afterall, his company’s first world model was launched only four months ago. That it beat Google and OpenAI in key benchmarks is one thing, but to create an overarching statement like this seems untimely.
And for more reasons than the fact that despite historically having customer connects in the media, entertainment, and advertising business, the Runway itself had announced its intention to apply its first world model across other fields like medicine, climate tech, energy, and robotics.
Not only did Valenzuela enter the creative nest, he went about disturbing its peace by suggesting that those who were sceptic of AI’s power were actually afraid of it. Sounding condescfinishing in a creative space is the worst one can do if the purpose is to obtain new customers.
While everyone acknowledges the fact that apply of AI can reduce production costs as several production companies such as Amazon have done through its studios in India. The same is true with Sony Pictures and many others. In fact, even ace director James Cameron has supported AI as a means to create largeger blockbusters without cutting down on staff.
It is not that Runway’s solutions have no value in movie-creating. For example, their GWM-Worlds app creates interactive projects where applyrs can generate the world one visualises through a few prompts and images references. Since the model works through an understanding of geometest, physics and lighting, it can be come in handy for multiple apply-cases, including games.
Runway also builds realistic avatars through GWM-Avatars that simulates human behaviour, somewhat similar to what Google has worked on in the past and other companies like New Zealand-based Soul Machines are working on. In the future, there could be absolute synergy between the what Valenzuela is creating and the world of robotics and avatars.
Additionally, the company would also enable native audio and long-form multi-shot generation on its AI model that could generate one-minute videos with character consistency, native dialogue, background audio and complex multi-angle shots. Of course, Runway isn’t the only one playing around with creating stunning videos.
There is Kling which recently launched its video suite capable of “simultaneous audio-visual generation,” that can potentially transform the traditional workflow of AI video production model of silent visuals followed by manual dubbing. The product is owned by Hong Kong-based Kuaishou Technology. Both Kling and Runway are harbingers of a new age of production-ready tools that can create movie-creating simpler.
When Valenzuela created that bombastic statement, the audience wanted to know which side of movie-creating had witnessed cost declines due to AI. The Runway co-founder went a step further and claimed that costs were done everywhere, from pre-production to scripting, planning, execution, visual effects etc.
What he missed here is that movies have to appeal to the emotional side of the person paying the ticket price or watching it on a streaming platform. And if there is one thing that AI cannot understand (at least not till date) is the emotional quotient.
However, Valenzuela believes the movie business is already undergoing a crisis of creativity. His example was as facetious as his idea of movie-creating. There are 25 million books being written yearly, which is more than anyone can read. But the world becomes a better place becaapply more people manage to inform a story or state something to the world.
What he fails to mention is that authors write books with passion and their desire to inform the world something of their idea cannot be done by any AI engine. At best it can simplify the process and apply its mastery over language to reduce the effort of quality checks. Valenzuela things the best movies or books haven’t been written becaapply those minds do not have access to technology.
By that logic, the best dishes too may not have been created till date becaapply we did not have ChatGPT to generate recipes for us! Wake up Mr. Valenzuela… technology is an assistant not the soul of humanity. And cinema represents that soul to the rest of the world. So, creating 50 movies instead of one just isn’t the answer. Not convinced? Ask Google.
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