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Tag: movies

  • This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over

    This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over

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    On the subject of money and ownership. Earlier this year, following the cancellation of several Black TV shows, you wrote, “studios and streamers no longer care about loyalty or enduring legacy.” Why does Hollywood, in 2024, still have such a difficult time aligning its legacy with its business?

    Well, here’s the thing, the legacy business, they feel as if that work is behind them.

    But isn’t that what Hollywood is built on?

    Yes, but to create new legacy and new inroads, to them, that is less important than extracting every possible dollar from existing IP. It’s more expensive, quote-unquote, to create something than it is to rest on existing laurels. The beginning of the end of this, to me, was when Warner Brothers and UPN merged into The CW. Now, 20 years later, the CW is a shell of itself. In mergers, you’re no longer competing with someone to make the best content. With the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery, they own, what, one fourth of TV? That competition era of television—it’s over.

    Which has a direct impact on the creative side.

    The legacy-driven model only happens now in vanity. So a lot of stars are using their own distribution or first-look deals to produce things. And these are the majority of people who are allowed to create. So what does Hollywood mean when the only people who are given freedom are people who have already done the taxing work—if they have at all—to become stars? Hollywood is not in the business of guarantee. Everything must be proven before it’s even created.

    And if that’s the case, so many people get left out.

    The fight for nostalgia as currency comes in a moment where some of the highest rated things are non-white. That’s not an accident. It’s as if television, media, and filmmaking are becoming manifest destiny in the wrong ways. And there’s nothing sadder.

    Perhaps we need better frameworks.

    People have upended industries to chase Netflix. And no one has caught up. Everything has fallen in this chase. What’s happening now is, people are only duplicating the best and the most watched. There is no diversity in how things are being delivered.

    You once described “post-2020 Black media as akin to a modern day blaxploitation boom.” It got me thinking about platforms like Tubi and AllBlk, which are sometimes mocked as being a kind of streaming ghetto, but those same streamers have also given opportunities to young creators.

    Blaxploitation, as I was saying, makes way for Spike Lee, it makes way for the ‘80s independent Black movement that, of course, shapes everything we know about modern Black film and modern Black media. At every valley, there is a peak. It’s the nature of life. So what do I think is a head? We should be thinking about independent models that have existed before our current era. There are many ways to make media. With pilot season essentially dying, as the studios have announced, what are some ways that Black creators can forge together to make what they desire?

    I mean, I don’t know if I have the answers, but I do have the curiosity. And oftentimes curiosity and care—and leading with them—can transform how we understand history and the future.



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  • James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader Has Already Been Immortalized With AI

    James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader Has Already Been Immortalized With AI

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    If anyone could make the Dark Side sound good, it was James Earl Jones. The actor, who died Monday at the age of 93, provided the voice for Darth Vader in more than a dozen Star Wars properties, from A New Hope to Star Tours. He made the Force sound ominous in a way that made it appealing. With his passing, it feels as though all the power and gravitas and respect he brought to the character is gone.

    It’s not. It’s in the hands of AI.

    A few years ago, when Jones provided a few lines of dialog as Vader for The Rise of Skywalker, he’d expressed interest in wrapping up his time as the Sith Lord, according to Vanity Fair. Lucasfilm, in need of a way to continue the character—and particular to continue having a version of the character’s voice as it sounded in those early Star Wars movies—turned to a Ukrainian company called Respeecher that used artificial intelligence to make a recreation of the Vader voice based on Jones’ past performances. (The actor signed off on the use of his archive to train the speech model.)

    Ultimately, Respeecher’s work, completed amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ended up in Obi-Wan Kenobi, and what, if any, Vader performance that comes in the future could now depend on its AI. (Reps for Respeecher and Lucasfilm did not immediately return emails seeking comment.)

    Jones’ passing marks a pivotal moment in the future of AI-generated performances. During last year’s prolonged Hollywood actors’ strike, one of the biggest sticking points between the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, and the studios was whether or not studios needed to secure permissions to use a past performance to train AI models. Ultimately, SAG won guardrails around the use of AI in recreating performances. Now the question is: How will those play out with Darth Vader?

    It’s a particularly interesting question when it comes to voice acting specifically. The full recreation of vocals may feel further along than the full recreation of whole performances, but they also feel more poignant.

    When Paul McCartney used AI to help fashion a Beatles song from tapes made when the Fab Four were still alive, the results felt haunted. When OpenAI released a demo of its voice assistant Sky and Scarlett Johansson believed it sounded much like the voice she used in Her, she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” that the company “would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.” OpenAI denied she was the inspiration, but paused the demo. Video game voice actors are on strike right now to get protections for their vocal performances. Voices, it seems, are currently at their highest value.

    Ultimately, what will now happen to the Darth Vader voice is not really a question of rights—Jones gave permission—but rather one of emotion. Will Lucasfilm, or its parent company Disney, want to produce future Star Wars shows or movies featuring AI Vader following Jones’ death? Will people respond positively to them? With a character as iconic as Vader, should there be a point at which fans let go?

    From Audrey Hepburn selling Dove chocolates to hologram Tupac, posthumous performances have been a part of pop culture for years. But unlike Audrey and Pac, Jones is in on the plan; he is seemingly the first celebrity to have allowed his iconic presence to be recreated with AI before his passing. What will likely decide how well AI Vader goes over is how it’s handled. A Darth Vader feature film may not be as warmly received as, say, a Force ghost cameo or a flashback. It’ll be a test to see how welcomed the character will be now that the man behind it is gone.

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  • The End of ‘Brat Summer’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think

    The End of ‘Brat Summer’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think

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    Charli XCX said it, so it must be true: Brat Summer is over. In a tweet so echoey it got several news hits, the club rat/pop girl said goodbye to the season that may come to define her career—and America’s political future. It was September 2, 87 days after Charli released the album Brat and 43 days after she declared that Vice President Kamala Harris “IS brat.” Normally, the fall, spooky end-of-summer vibes don’t really start until, like, the end of the month, but being online has always been a surefire way to warp one’s sense of time.

    This year, though, that warp comes at warp speed. As Bethy Squires pointed out at Vulture this week, the internet seems to be “starting spooky season early.” Perhaps Demure Autumn didn’t give people enough of what they needed; maybe everyone just wants to get in a lot of Halloween before everyone has to start preparing for the holidays on October 1(ish). A few TikTokkers are advocating for a fall dedicated to Magdelena Bay’s album Imaginal Disk.

    More than that, though, I’d say this all has something to do with the fact that being extremely online means observing one’s own calendar, one slightly aligned with the Gregorian one but with its own set of holidays and traditions.

    You already know them: Galentine’s Day, Beyoncé’s birthday (which was just honored on Wednesday), that time in spring when everyone starts posting “It’s gonna be May” with an image macro of Justin Timberlake’s grinning mug. Right now, perhaps a bit early, Spooktober and a new Pumpkin Spice Latte/PSL Season is upon us. Like many others, that last one, similar to National Doughnut Day, is one that while perhaps not entirely the product of a corporate marketing whiz, is definitely one that benefits Starbucks. #Brands like hopping on #trends. Now, when they know there’s a surefire way to be a part of something, like Pride Month, they put it on a calendar and roll out a whole campaign.

    This is perhaps how things got here in the first place. Everyone from Gen Z TikTokers to the Dunkin’ social media manager needs to know when to get on the trend and when to get off. Presumably this is why the Kamala HQ X account has already removed its Brat Green hue. As my colleague Leah Feiger discussed with writer Hunter Harris a few weeks back, as the US gets closer to Election Day in November, the pop culture moment around Harris will likely shift back to a more political one.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to TikTok.



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  • How the Cyber-Thriller ‘Red Rooms’ Became a Cult Classic Before It Was Ever Released

    How the Cyber-Thriller ‘Red Rooms’ Became a Cult Classic Before It Was Ever Released

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    Digital piracy often gets a bad rap. Maybe it’s memories of those old “You wouldn’t steal a car” pre-roll ads that were a fixture in theaters. Maybe it’s the word “piracy.” But recent research suggests that uploading, downloading, and swapping movies illegally isn’t necessarily an impediment to a given title’s bottom line. One study found that word of mouth generated by illegal sharing of movies can actually increase box-office revenues. And for cinephiles who may be cut off (either financially or geographically) for the indie or art-house cinemas, piracy can prove essential—or at least a necessary evil. As Andy Chatterley, CEO of research firm Muso, told WIRED earlier this year, “The thing about piracy is, it’s really just people wanting to consume content. They’re not doing it for the act of piracy; they’re being driven by marketing on other things that drive legal consumption.”

    Smaller films like Red Rooms often find audiences in such less-than-legal circles. Lucas Tavares, 23, lives in a small town in Brazil. He obsessively follows film coverage on social media platforms like X and Letterboxd. Red Rooms first came to his attention over a year ago, when it premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. A few weeks later, he was able to scrounge a copy online. “Where I live,” he says, “it’s very hard to see smaller movies, and independent movies, especially if they are not American blockbusters. So I rely on torrents a lot.”

    For Henry Meeks, a 29-year old school teacher in Philadelphia, torrents and online piracy channels became essential during the Covid-19 lockdowns. With cinemas shuttered and film production all but halted, many cinephiles took the opportunity to dig deeper into older, harder-to-find films. “What I love about piracy,” Meeks says, “is that there’s tons of movies that have fallen out of distribution. There’s no Blu-ray. So it’s a really good archival practice. Stuff that I really can’t find anywhere, even if I wanted to buy it, is kept alive on those websites.”

    When Meeks heard some buzz about Red Rooms, he downloaded it and immediately shared it with friends on Plex: the freeware streaming-media service that allows users to amass and share collections of private media. This curation distinguishes private servers like Plex from the bigger, aboveground streaming services with their algorithmic recommendation systems. “Netflix and Amazon Prime have more movies than you could ever see,” Meeks says. “But it’s not really curated by a human.”

    Plante seems a little ambivalent about his movie’s success online. While he is embracing his movie leaking, he notes that building this sort of word of mouth was very much “not a strategy.” He says the film’s French-Canadian distributor insisted on dropping Red Rooms’ on Canadian video-on-demand services shortly after its theatrical premiere. “I told him that the day after it’s on iTunes in Canada, it’s going to be on freaking PirateBay,” he says, referring to the popular BitTorrent client.

    Of course, not everyone has the ability, or inclination, to download MP4 or AVI files of relatively obscure French-Canadian cyber-thrillers. Plante is confident the film’s upcoming wide release in US cinemas, on September 6, will help expand his movie’s niche, cultish appeal. Smaller movies like this tend to have a long life, moving through the international film festival circuit to bigger bookings in cinemas and to home video. Gray-web peer-to-peer file-sharing websites are just one place people can find the film.

    Still, Plante finds it totally appropriate that his movie about the internet’s underbelly has found an audience among people who wade in those same waters.“It’s a very online, very geeky film,” he says. “Of course people are going to torrent it.”

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  • The Search for the Face Behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing

    The Search for the Face Behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing

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    Jazmin Jones knows what she did. “If you’re online, there’s this idea of trolling,” Jones, the director behind Seeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. “For this project, some things we’re taking incredibly seriously … and other things we’re trolling. We’re trolling this idea of a detective because we’re also, like, ACAB.”

    Her trolling, though, was for a good reason. Jones and fellow filmmaker Olivia Mckayla Ross did it in hopes of finding the woman behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

    The popular teaching tool was released in 1987 by The Software Toolworks, a video game and software company based in California that produced educational chess, reading, and math games. Mavis, essentially the “mascot” of the game, is a Black woman donned in professional clothes and a slicked-back bun. Though Mavis Beacon was not an actual person, Jones and Ross say that she is one of the first examples of Black representation they witnessed in tech. Seeking Mavis Beacon, which opened in New York City on August 30 and is rolling out to other cities in September, is their attempt to uncover the story behind the face, which appeared on the tool’s packaging and later as part of its interface.

    The film shows the duo setting up a detective room, conversing over FaceTime, running up to people on the street, and even tracking down a relative connected to the ever-elusive Mavis. But the journey of their search turned up a different question they didn’t initially expect: What are the impacts of sexism, racism, privacy, and exploitation in a world where you can present yourself any way you want to?

    Using shots from computer screens, deep dives through archival footage, and sit-down interviews, the noir-style documentary reveals that Mavis Beacon is actually Renée L’Espérance, a Black model from Haiti who was paid $500 for her likeness with no royalties, despite the program selling millions of copies.

    Creating artificial likenesses of people from marginalized groups is not unique to Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Big brands have used these likenesses to generate both notoriety and money without disseminating that success to the real people behind the inspiration.

    “Lil Miquela,” an AI-generated music artist with some 2.5 million Instagram followers, appears in commercials for BMW. MSI, which recently partnered with the artificial influencer to promote an OLED monitor, noted on a web page touting the collaboration that Lil’ Miquela has “a rich heritage of half-Brazilian and half-Spanish roots.” The AI bot reportedly makes millions of dollars per year as an influencer. Meanwhile, human BIPOC social media influencers report making up to 67 percent less than white influencers per Instagram post, according to findings released last year by the public relations firm MSL Group.

    Another example is Shudu Gram, who, according to her Instagram account, is known as “the world’s first digital supermodel.” Launched in 2017, Shudu is long and lean with very dark skin. She looks even more human than Lil Miquela, but she’s not. At a time when Black models still face challenges in the fashion industry, Gram has appeared in Vogue Czechoslovakia, partnered with Sony Pictures, and amassed 239,000 followers on Instagram.



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  • Online Action Movie Fandom Birthed a New Film Fest Era

    Online Action Movie Fandom Birthed a New Film Fest Era

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    Young and Robinson weren’t planning on entering the exhibition space back when they were touring their movies, but those experiences did end up planting seeds for Big Bad later on. “The napkin scribbles were really our experiences with Kay [Lynch] at Salem Horror Fest and Mitch [Harrod] at Soho Horror,” Robinson says. “They’ve been really great resources for us in terms of how to put together a semi-home grown festival.”

    Group Chat

    Besides being the ultimate in communal cinematic experiences, another way action movies mirror scary ones is the infinite shareability of bite-size nuggets pulled from their choicest scenes. A standalone clip of a fight scene or even just a GIF of a single, eye-popping kick to the face can be thrilling enough to draw people into watching a whole movie so they can catch that one moment. This makes Twitter, where you have the speed of a scroll to grab someone’s attention, fertile ground for action movie fandom. Sometimes, entire conversations are built around fans just saying names back and forth to each other with awesome media attached.

    Boyka! *GIF of spinning kick through the air*
    Fist of the Condor?! *clip of Marko Zoror destroying a guy*
    CYNTHIA ROTHROCK! *still of her with Michelle Yeoh in Yes, Madam!*

    Dropping into the right Action Twitter thread can feel like falling into a greatest hits playlist of the coolest looking movies you’ve never heard of. You can either sink your teeth in and go the deeply technical route with accounts like Shogun Supreme, an Action Twitter megamind known for their granular color grade and audio comparisons across the various physical media releases for a single film. Or you can just punch in and have a ball with handles like Exploding Helicopter, which truly exists to document every time a helicopter has ever exploded in a movie.

    Young says that account expanded his personal watch list by “hundreds” of titles when he first wandered into Action Twitter, and it was one of the feeds he got hooked on back in the days when everyone was living almost exclusively online: the 2020 Covid lockdown. “I was waking up very early and throwing on the El Rey Network,” says Young, referencing the genre-heavy cable channel. “From five in the morning to 10 in the morning all they played was Shaw Brothers films, and I got obsessed with them and started looking for people to talk about them.”

    From there Young started following writers on Twitter like Brandon Streussnig, who spearheads the now-annual Vulture Stunt awards; Priscilla Page, who does rigorous close reads into movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Mad Max: Fury Road; and Outlaw Vern, a veteran of Ain’t It Cool News and independent critic who has written books on the movies of Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis. Young discovered accounts like One Perfect Headshot that were spreading the gospel of things like Chinese DTV action movies. He started learning about how those Shaw Brothers classics he was mainlining “go hand-in-hand with the Scott Adkins and Isaac Florentines of the world.”

    We’re Gonna Need a Montage

    Twitter was teaching Young the language of action beyond what gets the most showtimes at your local AMC theater, and even though Big Bad Film Fest wouldn’t go live until 2023, it was those terrible, halcyon days of pre-Elon Twitter that spawned the idea of a festival made just for action fans. A prompt went around on the platform at one point for people to create their own month of dream programming at Quentin Tarantino’s famous L.A. repertory theater, the New Beverly Cinema. Young’s slate ended up being almost entirely action movies, and that got him thinking enough to message Robinson about it.

    “Patrick just texted me one day. I feel like all of our collaboration has been the drunken theme of talking to your buddy and you’re like, ‘We should start a bar!’ Except we do it dead sober and go ‘We should start a film festival!’” But unlike most bros who dream of opening a bar, the longtime creative partners started doing the leg work to figure out actual logistics: which theater to set up at (one they live close to!), getting DCPs (Digital Cinema Package files that play on projectors) made of movies so they weren’t just putting Blu-rays up on a screen; and corralling enough filmmakers to say yes to their unknown, untested festival to build out a whole weekend of programming.



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  • The 7 Best Projectors According to Our Reviewers (2024)

    The 7 Best Projectors According to Our Reviewers (2024)

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    Projectors offer larger screen sizes and a more cinematic viewing experience than their TV counterparts, but that doesn’t mean they’re easier to set up. That’s why we have an entire guide to How to Buy a Projector to check out!

    Unless you’re going for a portable option, you’ll want to make sure you have a projector mount ($20) and audio cables properly routed to the location of your projector. This is because setting up full-size projectors to fit your screen, be in focus, etc., can be a pain, so once you get everything dialed in, you’ll want to leave it as-is.

    Make sure you get enough lumens (how bright your projector will get at its peak, the higher the number the better). Over 2,000 lumens is a good starting space for any kind of lit viewing, but we recommend 3000 or above if you’re viewing in a bright room.

    Another thing to bear in mind before you get a projector is just how much space you’ll need to properly set it up. In most cases, you’ll need 10 to 15 feet between the screen and the projector (be sure to check the “throw distance” listed by the manufacturer in the manual) to achieve screen sizes over 100 inches.

    Without a completely dark room, the image can look washed out and be hard to see. If you don’t have a room without windows, consider getting blackout curtains. For more detailed information on how to set up a projector after it arrives, I highly recommend this video.

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  • The Studio Executive Who Wants Hollywood to Get Real About Bad Storytelling

    The Studio Executive Who Wants Hollywood to Get Real About Bad Storytelling

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    That’s fair.

    When you think about building stories from multiple audiences, not just audiences of color, but also queer audiences, disabled audiences, female audiences, I mean, we’re seeing so much evidence at the box office lately suggesting how difficult it is to construct a hit that isn’t a hit with BIPOC and female audiences. Unfortunately, we don’t have as much data on queer and disabled audiences from a box office perspective, but everything that I’m reading tells me that as those audiences become more vocal it is impossible to build a hit without them.

    When we say we are trying to broaden the commercial appeal, it’s really trying to give you a lot of different entry points into different audiences from a more authentic point of view. So that when they see that character in the movie trailer, they feel as if real thought went into it as opposed to what feels like more surface-level or token representation that doesn’t really yield what you’re looking for.

    What would you say to someone who calls Story Spark another AI tool studios are forcing on an already fractured industry?

    There is no AI involved in Story Spark whatsoever. The only thing that is at work is your brain.

    The original AI.

    Right. Actual intelligence. One thing from my time in tech was learning how to build scalable solutions that people can use. You are not uploading a script. You are taking a script that you know well and you’re asking yourself a set of questions about it or you’re asking your creative collaborators a set of questions about it. To the idea of studios forcing things onto a fractured marketplace, I think that one of the lessons for me coming out of the strikes is that consumers are extremely discerning and part of the role studios play in a good partnership with a storyteller is finding those places of positive construction, debate, and dialogue. If the studio exec agrees with everything and has no notes, it’s probably not gonna be the best movie it could be. The same with storytellers—you don’t have to take every note, but you can’t take no notes.

    Because if you don’t, what happens?

    In my opinion, there would be nothing worse than showing up on opening weekend and all of a sudden there are narratives connected to your movie that never came up in development. We want to take that off the table and front load those conversations.

    Story Spark isn’t AI but AI is coming for Hollywood regardless. OpenAI is courting many of the big studios with Sora, a text-driven video generator. Many filmmakers have strong reservations about the use of AI and its consequences. Would you say those reservations are justified?

    What has always happened as new technologies come online is that there is the immediate sort of, Oh my god, VCRs mean that no one’s ever gonna go to the movies again. And then we realized, no, we actually still like going out and doing those things. Streaming means albums will never be listened to again. And it’s like, no, actually, we still enjoy listening to an artist’s work from start to finish. That’s how I listened to Cowboy Carter and to Renaissance. While the fear is reasonable, I think that it will create really smart limits.

    How so?

    We as humans, but also as creatives, have always been able to navigate and to leverage to our benefit, whatever these different technologies are. I don’t see any evidence that AI will be significantly different from that in the long run. For people on the studio side and on the creative side—and anywhere in between—my invitation would be to think about how AI is a tool in the tool kit, but it never replaces the person holding the tool. Because we have knives, does it mean we are useless now? No. I can cut those things faster instead of having to rip the chicken apart. I’m still a chef.

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  • Shockbuster Season: Why the Death of the Summer Movie Is a Good Thing

    Shockbuster Season: Why the Death of the Summer Movie Is a Good Thing

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    Forty-seven years ago today, everything changed. True believers might already know what it was: On May 25, 1977, Star Wars hit movie theaters and irrevocably altered nearly everything pertaining to the act of moviegoing. Lines around the block, overly excited nerds, an appetite for action figures. Star Wars taught Hollywood that certain genres—sci-fi, fantasy, anything that percolated in the offbeat TV shows, books, and comics of the 1950s and ’60s—had fans, and those fandoms would show up. Star Wars made a meager $1.6 million in the US in its opening weekend. But people kept coming back, and by the end of its initial run it had made more than $300 million. Hollywood’s Next Big Thing had arrived.

    Common wisdom dictates that Jaws, which came out in 1975 and made some $260 million, was the first summer blockbuster. That’s true, but it was Star Wars that shifted the idea of what kind of film future popcorn flicks tried to be. In the years after its release, a trove of sci-fi and genre films landed in theaters: Blade Runner, Alien, E.T., the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior. By the ’90s, the summer movie energy had shifted to action fare—Twister, Speed, Jurassic Park, Independence Day—but nerd stuff still ruled. For every Forrest Gump there was a Batman Returns or Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

    Then came a little juggernaut called Marvel. By the time Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies started clearing nine-figure opening weekends in the aughts, it was obvious that comic book heroes’ true superpowers involved making your money disappear. The Avengers opened in early May 2012 and nearly recouped its $200-million-plus production budget in three days. Suddenly, there were at least two superhero movies every year, if not every summer, and some new Star Wars flicks at the holidays.

    The one-two punch of Covid-19 theater closures and streaming pretty much kneecapped this entire process. The summer of 2020 had virtually no blockbusters, and by the time moviegoers returned to multiplexes in 2021 and 2022, there had been a vibe shift. Movies like Black Widow and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness did well, but they weren’t events. Rushing to Fandango for tickets didn’t feel as urgent as it once did. Last summer, Barbenheimer was the buzziest thing in movies. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made money, but they still got beat by Barbie’s might.

    Overall, this year could be a wake-up call for studios that superhero fatigue has fully set in, says Chris Nashawaty, author of The Future Was Now, a new book out in July about how the movies of 1982—Blade Runner, E.T., Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, among others—ushered in the current blockbuster era. That epoch, he says, “was always going to be something that couldn’t last forever; I’m frankly surprised that it lasted as long as it did.”

    Nashawaty says the success of Barbenheimer—both movies—indicates that audiences are hungry for smart films, but Hollywood’s risk aversion likely means studios will greenlight more projects based on toys and games like Monopoly rather than movies about physicists. “This is a real existential moment in Hollywood right now,” he adds, and studios need to be bold to stay relevant.

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  • Scarlett Johansson’s OpenAI Feud Makes Her an Uncanny Folk Hero

    Scarlett Johansson’s OpenAI Feud Makes Her an Uncanny Folk Hero

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    There is a distinct moment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when Black Widow became a hero for the everyfan. It happens early in 2012’s The Avengers: She’s tied to a chair. Agent Coulson calls. A nondescript military leader who has been interrogating her hands her the phone. Coulson explains that S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to pull her out of the field. She kicks her questioner in the shin, smashes the chair she’s tied to, takes out three dudes, grabs her heels, and leaves.

    The Avengers went on to make $1.5 billion globally and catapulted nearly everyone in it to superstardom, even the actors who were already famous. Scarlett Johnasson’s Black Widow—the Avenger with no wealth and no superpowers beyond Red Room training—was one of the last to get her own movie or show. Black Widow was simultaneously released in theaters and on Disney+ in the summer of 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic still had some people wary of the multiplex. Johansson sued Disney for breach of contract, claiming the streaming release hurt the movie’s box office potential.

    Johansson and Disney ultimately settled their suit. The terms weren’t disclosed, but the outcome was that Johansson proved she was not afraid of defending the worth of her work—whether against Disney, which had already paid her $20 million for the movie she made, or against OpenAI, which she threatened with legal action this week over its new conversational ChatGPT interface. The actor claims the computer’s voice, called Sky, sounds “so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Sky “was never intended to resemble” Johansson’s voice. Lawyers say she might have a case, should she pursue one.

    Following Johansson’s calling out of OpenAI, public opinion has largely been on her side. Or, rather, it’s sought to be on the side that isn’t Altman’s. Across X and news reports, pontificators noted that OpenAI’s actions tipped the company’s hand; that by, per Johansson’s statement, asking for the actress’ involvement and then proceeding with something similar even though she declined, Altman was “showing us who he really is.” Within hours, Johansson became an avatar of the resistance, this generation’s Ned Ludd. Everyone who’d ever wondered if AI had read their tweets or watched their video had a champion.

    “In a way, we are all Scarlett Johansson,” Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker, “waiting to be confronted with an uncanny reflection of ourselves that was created without our permission and from which we will reap no benefit.”

    Few ironies are more bittersweet than this. The reason Johansson’s voice is desirable for an AI assistant is because she played one in Spike Jonze’s movie Her. As my colleague Brian Barrett pointed out last week, wanting to replicate that experience demonstrates a gross misreading of that film, but the fact remains that both tech honchos and those who live at their whims (aka everybody else) have parasocial relationships with Johansson because she has a skill set that AI just can’t learn. Now, those who have found joy in her work are identifying with her in a whole new way because she can confront AI’s encroachment more publicly than all those lawsuits brought by artists and writers.

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