Not to be terribly hyperbolic, but Disney investing in OpenAI is pretty horrible news. The media titan has officially partnered with the controversial artificial intelligence brand and it is not ideal for artists, fans of movies, and just general humanity.
Disney Officially Invests in OpenAI
Disney has officially signed a deal with OpenAI and invested $1 billion in the company, so they are going all-out with the support of the controversial AI brand. With this, Sora, the AI app that makes videos that have become increasingly difficult to determine whether they’re real or not, will have access to a wealth of legitimate characters and content.
It’s almost as if Disney doesn’t quite realize that this is bad for them, too. Why would people pay to go watch movies in theaters about Iron Man, Darth Vader, or Spider-Man when they can just put a similar prompt into Sora and make their own videos? Eventually, with Sora getting more accurate and more difficult to see through all the time, people can make their own movies.
Why would someone bother trying to get involved with Disney to make a Star Wars movie when they can just use the officially licensed characters to splice together AI videos with Darth Vader, Mace Windu, Jar-Jar Binks, and Poe Dameron? Filmmakers are going to have a tough time beating out the AI videos, and it’s going to lead to fewer being interested in these projects, thus hurting Disney’s bottom line.
In fact, tons of movies will suffer for it. The MCU, as massive as it is, will take a hit with fans being able to generate movies with Spider-Man, Thor, and Hulk. Fans don’t have to go watch Avengers: Doomsday because they could just insert the plot as a prompt and get a similar product. It won’t be the same movie, but people who use AI won’t care.
Hollywood is Utterly Doomed
This comes as part of the never-ending news cycle of nightmarish updates for the film industry. Say what you want about Disney, but so far, they’ve remained committed to making movies and putting them in theaters. Many aren’t good movies, but they haven’t gone the Netflix route and churned out endless slop, nor have they put things in theaters only briefly to then get them on their own streaming service.
But that’s where the problem lies. Netflix is likely about to own Warner Bros., which means tons of big IP will eventually be phased out of theaters. Combine that with Disney’s IP being slowly phased out because of this AI deal, and Hollywood is suddenly out a whole lot.
Estimates say that Warner Bros. brands make up about 16% of Hollywood. Disney, at its peak, was at about 35%. That means over 50% of Hollywood is slowly going to vanish if things continue down this road. Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. might help theaters, but that’s an entirely different can of worms that isn’t much better.
So when Disney gets replaced by AI, of their own stupid volition, and Warner Bros. is on streaming alone thanks to Netflix, there will not be enough to keep theaters going, thereby ruining the film industry in so many different ways.
Conclusion
It cannot be overstated how bleak things look for the film industry. Netflix and Disney are among the biggest pieces of the pie, and they’re both trying, in different ways, to totally reshape (read: ruin) the way this field works. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for me, it’s not even good for them, but that doesn’t seem to matter to these companies.
