Bobby Miller is a filmmaker and author from New Jersey who lives in Los Angeles. His films have premiered at Sundance, SXSW and Fantasia. His debut novel, Situation Nowhere, is available now. Learn more at: SituationNowhere.com.
Listen, I know that’s a clickbait headline. Before you come at me, remember, I famously proclaimed AI art was for losers back in 2023. So, relax. But my view has evolved, and it’s been spearheaded by tech bros on social media. Their responses to AI-generated film clips are usually: “Hollywood doesn’t make anything original anymore. AI movies will be just as good.”
At first, I wanted to attack these people. “It’s not our fault!” I wanted to say. “We filmmakers didn’t spend years learning our craft/being poor/ruining relationships just to reboot pre-existing IP!”
But then I realized I was being a hypocrite.
I directed Critters Attack! for Chrissake.
There were red flags all over that little low-budget movie (I had two weeks to hand in a final cut), but my managers talked me into it. “It’s like doing a studio film, but without the risk.”
The risk they speak of is real. I’ve seen filmmakers direct giant franchise movies and dip out of the business, broken from having to direct by committee, ideas constantly second-guessed. Other more fortunate ones seem to get their voice through the franchise machine. It’s a gamble.
But the problem isn’t with the executives in Hollywood.
When I was going on general meetings, I would often meet with execs who looked forlorn, beaten up. Like someone took their lunch money.
A thing often said to me: “Let me stop you there: we’re not listening to any original pitches. It has to be something we already own.”
I have sympathy for these execs. Like me, they didn’t get into this business to work on reboots. Yes, there are outliers. Cronenberg’s The Fly is one of my top ten movies! Ditto for The Thing! But there used to be a time where our culture wasn’t just reboots/sequels.
We can keep pointing fingers for the decline of the movies as a popular art form, but the corporations have hit on something that works for them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Studio heads believe the only thing that can make money is spectacle-driven IP. Advertising dollars are trained on this purpose. Audiences come out. Rinse and repeat.
But we keep coming out to see this stuff. We’re all to blame.
I mourn for my child’s future. I mourn for the notion that he will not experience what I did watching Gremlins or E.T. for the first time. Or The Matrix. Fight Club. American Beauty. Hell, anything from 1999, really.
He will be forced to watch regurgitated IP, reboots, sequels of movies from my youth. His generation will have nothing original to hold onto at the movies.
That is profoundly sad.
Enter AI. Could there be a technology better suited for this current moment of private equity filmmaking? With filmmaking already resorting to endless reboots and sequels, why not automate the whole damn thing with AI? Remove the artists from the equation!
But I’d like to posit a counterpoint: Nah, son.
This has to be the moment artists push back.
Would I love to see a million artists march on Silicon Valley this year? A grand protest against the mass copyright infringement perpetrated by companies like OpenAI and Meta? 100 percent. Let me know. I’ll find a babysitter.
But lets face it, outside of massive societal backlash, we ain’t got a pot to piss in. I see no political party rallying behind AI regulation, and I know firsthand the studios are privately negotiating sales of their libraries to LLMs.
Maybe the cavalry isn’t coming.
So, what do we have left?
It’s our art. It’s all we ever had, anyway.
We need to get back to expressing what it is to be human and alive. Get off the internet, go into the woods, dig deep. Get weird! For me, it was pivoting to writing a novel. For others, it might be crowdfunding a personal film. Or hell, it might be locking into the IP machine and fighting tirelessly to make your franchise film alive and idiosyncratic. Lord knows I should have fought harder on Critters Attack!
Whatever it is, it has to start now.
We must prove to ourselves and the world that what we create is better than AI.
If not, we’re a Studio Ghibli meme away from irrelevance.
