AI is making waves in many industries, including filmmaking. Recent advances promise to propel AI in the film industry to a whole new level, with major impacts on the medium.
A 16-year-old movie that underperformed at the box office might not seem like the ideal choice for a project to repurpose, but Baz Luhrmann reworked material from his 2008 World War II romantic epic Australia into a six-part series called Faraway Downs for Hulu late last year. He saw it as a way to expand on themes like institutionalized racism toward First Nations peoples while using previously unused material and taking advantage of the longer-running, episodic medium.
As a filmmaking tool, AI is poised to do the kind of repurposing of footage that Luhrmann and Hulu did to an astonishing degree and with relative ease. Indeed, the technology may create completely new footage from scratch, without the need to bring big-name actors back to the set.
But fears about AI are rife in the media and entertainment industry. In 2023, it was a major component of stop-work actions by two of the most prominent artists’ industry unions. And as protesting actors and writers on one side and the studios on the other know all too well, AI is here to stay. The question is, how much of an impact will it make on the M&E industry?
