Tech Bought Hollywood’s Studios. Now AI Is Coming for Its Stars and Awards
Sorkin's Zuckerberg sequel opens as an Oracle heir takes Warner Bros. and an AI-made film chases an Oscar. Hollywood tamed every earlier technology. This one replaces the talent.
Hollywood opens a film today that puts Facebook in the dock, in the week a software dynasty took possession of Warner Bros. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg and Mikey Madison as the whistleblower Frances Haugen, reaches cinemas three days after David Ellison, son of the Oracle founder Larry Ellison, closed his takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery and folded it into Paramount Skydance.
Two more signals arrived in the same week. Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI chief Sam Altman, premiered at the New York Film Festival on Monday. And the makers of Gods Don’t Give Gifts, an R-rated feature generated with AI, announced a run at the Oscar for best animated feature. “For five years, the question has been when will an AI film win an Oscar?” said Edward Saatchi, chief executive of its producer, Fable.
Together they pose the question the industry can no longer postpone: will old Hollywood survive the onslaught of technology?
When Zuckerberg Was Hollywood’s Friend
The Social Network arrived in 2010, when social media was a welcome megaphone for studios trying to reach an audience, and Hollywood showered it with four Golden Globes and three Oscars. Fans came away treating its ruthless young founder as a hero. “Of course, I’m responsible,” Sorkin has said. “It wasn’t my intention.”
The sequel lands in a colder climate. The first film opened to $22.4 million; this one is tracking at $8 million to $13 million. Meta declined to comment on it.
The Old Survival Trick
Hollywood has faced existential threats from technology before: sound, television, VHS, DVD, streaming. It survived every one by adopting the invention and selling it back to the public. Each was a tool in the hands of talent. George Miller, describing the digital shoot of Mad Max: Fury Road, put it simply: “if something, a bit of a light stand or another camera happened to be in your shot, you can erase it.”
The warnings came all the same. In the summer of 2017 the chairman of Paramount, Jim Gianopulos, told me at a Golden Globes party that Hollywood had to change its ways to survive. Nine years on, that studio is the vehicle through which a software fortune swallowed Warner Bros., and its leadership includes veterans of Google, Facebook and Scale AI.
The Machine That Replaces the Talent
AI is a different beast, and the talent knows it. Every earlier invention needed writers, actors and crews to work it. This one replaces them completely. The guilds struck for months in 2023 and won limits; the writers’ contract states that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material”. In May the Academy ruled that Oscar-eligible roles must be “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” and that screenplays must be human-authored.
That tide is becoming a tsunami. Ben Affleck, whose AI company InterPositive Netflix bought in March, releases Animals on the streamer today. “I used [AI] for lots of things in that movie,” he said, adding that he was “a little bit hesitant to point out what they are”. Saatchi, meanwhile, says his machine-made feature “could be this generation’s Toy Story“. The comparison is pointed: Toy Story, the first feature made entirely on computers, began the retreat of hand-drawn animation from the big studios.
Cut Costs or Die
The money points the same way. Paramount Skydance carries roughly $80 billion in debt, and most of its promised savings are to come from “technology, integration and procurement, marketing and real estate rationalization”. Ellison insists: “I do not believe that AI is a replacement for human creativity.” He calls it “a force multiplier” for filmmakers. He also says: “Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete.”
A studio buried under that much debt will reach for AI to cut costs or die. Hollywood has always used technology to cut costs, and it will do so again to survive. Old Hollywood will endure the way a brand endures: the logo stays on the gate, the owners come from the software business, and the biggest cost left to cut is the talent.
Sources: CBS News; CNN via Yahoo Finance; Forbes; Futurism; SlashFilm; The Playlist; TechCrunch; Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Writers Guild of America.
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