30 Comments

"but they can also sound like tech CEOS trying to wow investors with buzzwords and talk of things to come."

Yeah that's what I'm taking from this. You can't impress the stockholders without promising something new and shiny down the horizon, right?

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AGBO's vision of the future seems bleak. Reading this reminded me of James Frey's publishing factory, Full Fathom Five, which (if memory serves) was a giant hangar full of MFAs shackled to desks who were only given food and water if they could generate ideas for Twilight-level YA franchises. Although if we were to somehow merge both entities....

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founding
Nov 8, 2022·edited Nov 8, 2022

"allows them to access their audiences anywhere at any time with any of their assets"

this is not how anyone interested in art speaks.

and frankly, it sounds terrifying

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I think these guys are way dumber than they realize, but unfortunately even dumber people with lots of money think they're smart.

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I saw the first fifteen-ish minutes of both Extraction and The Grey Man, and that was actually more than enough...

I do think they are way, way off base with the AI Tom Cruise thing. (BTW, it's entirely possible Tom Cruise, right now, is an AI robot...) The only time I think about how a movie is put together is when I lose interest in it. A good movie is a seamless dream... All those stitches become invisible.

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I miss the days when Hollywood insiders would say things like "Nobody knows anything."

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This weirdly reminds me of the same promises that Microsoft tried to deliver with "Second Screen" viewing from way back in the 2010s. To wit, you'd watch Game of Thrones through your Xbox and, in real time, you could view on your "second screen" app (via phone, tablet, laptop, etc) that the characters were currently in Town A. When the scene cuts to a new place your second screen would tell you that Jon Snow was on the Ice Wall and oh my is The Night King nearby?!? It sounds fun. But on a technical standpoint, not to mention logistics and licensing, this is a nightmare that could only exist if there were single monopoly corporations. So in theory, The Russos may know something we don't and this already sounds oddly like Amazon's X-Ray tool with a dash of The Congress and a lot of FCC de-regulation.

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The Russos' comments have strong Metaverse vibes, and we're witnessing how well Meta's bet on that perpetually shiny, distracting object of the tech world -- VR -- is working out.

Like Meta's idea of a future where we strap on a $1500 helmet to work on an Excel doc or sit on a conference call, their "vision" of the future involves an elaborate, expensive setup to deliver something that is relatively boring (and already available) to most people -- dry details on the filmmaking process.

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Me feel like issue of where visual medium of movingi pictures is headed and where Russos career is headed are two separate things.

But me think their bosses at Marvel have already shown us future model and we already live in that model, which is that entertainment is entertainment, and it can come in form of thing we watch on big screen with bucket of popcorn and box of cookie dough bites on lap, or it can be thing we watch one time on smaller screen at home (whether that TV or computer, and even that distinction ceasing to matter), or it can be thing that put our regular episodes and we watch on small screen, whether than on CBS or Netflix or YouTube.

Large, ambitious, well-funded project like MCU or Star Wars might hit every single one of those versions of watching thing on screen. But smaller project now have many more options. If me had idea for Sesame Street spinoff in 1986 and PBS said no, that was it for that idea. But now that idea can live on web site, or streaming service, it can be 22 minute episodes or 2 minute episodes.

And VR and AI and all kind of interactive thing — that will probably start to creep in too. Lines between forms of entertainment getting blurrier and blurrier. But that okay. It give much more opportunity to be creative. Stranger Things can do wildly different episode lengths if that what serves story best. Sherlock can do three 90-minute episodes, call that season, and put out new season at random intervals when actors' schedules line up. Good Mythical Morning can have several times as many viewers as Today Show. We already live in this new world Russos are speculating about.

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Treating these journeymen like Cameron or Spielberg because they did a decent job making movies that were already destined to break box office records is one of the more baffling bets Hollywood has made in a while. The way they talk about movies is so antiseptic and corporate. For all of his ridiculous bravado, at least Cameron seems interested in the advancement of film technology primarily for its storytelling implications, not so whichever company he's working for can "access" us anywhere at anytime with his "assets."

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This is all leading to a movie where I can enter my name, take a picture of my face, read a few lines of dialog, and then be rendered by AI as the main character.

And that movie will be very shitty.

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author

Behind the Scenes: I like to put that December 28th, 1895 detail into pieces from time to time because it's my birthday. (Not the 1895 part.)

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They're way off-base with the Tom Cruise thing, but it's just one of those grand speculative ideas that you see in science fiction that will never become reality because it puts too many carts in front of horses.

Streaming has severely upended the game for film, but not because it was some hyper-futuristic idea; it is a version of a thing we already had (distributed media), applied to things that people already wanted (the content itself within the media). Assuming that people want an AI/3D graphic/hologram(?) version of the actor-in-the-role of whatever they're watching presupposes that 1) that type of technology will exist in the near future (if it ever does, which I doubt, it will take another 50 years minimum), and 2) that people want that functionality - as others have already commented, if someone leaves a narrative mid-stream, they're effectively abandoning that narrative for something else entirely. They might as well watch a TikTok of something completely unrelated to the Tom Cruise thing.

Besides that I'll say the bulk of their business ventures so far has the right idea and does point towards the future; whether or not each one pans out is another question. They've identified various IP that they have "jumped the gap" like migrating settlers and prospectors of yore to seize and monetize ASAP. That's really the whole idea, not the various "Tiktok crossed with gaming", "3D crossed with AI, crossed with ___" junk - those are each variations on "...emulating the approach taken by Netflix and other streaming services: just keep moving forward, pumping out products and innovations built around the latest trends and hope the momentum lasts...".

Key to their strategy, that they aren't saying openly, is that the major corporations sitting on their own IP fortunes (cough*e.g. Disney*cough) are really sitting on a finite resource like petroleum, and that there are only so many profit-making draws from the reservoir before they either give it up as used/spent (Universal horror monsters, for a brief moment), or have to work harder to pull more ideas that might sell to the public (prequels, reboots, legacyquels, anyone?). Whereas, if the Russos find new "gold" in them thar hills, they'll be the new Disney.

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Yeah, this is very much executive brain creeping into a normal brain. Like a fungus.

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I’m sorry but they’re full of shit. half of what they’re saying is incoherent nonsense or pie-in-the-sky shit.

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They seem hell bent on the road to irrelevance, if you ask me.

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