AI-Generated Movies Only Two Years Away, Says Hollywood Director
According to Joe Russo, the director of the Marvel Studios blockbuster “Avengers: Endgame,” AI-generated movies are just around the corner. Russo recently shared his vision during a panel at the Sands International Film Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was joined by Epic Games CCO Donald Mustard.
During the meeting, Russo speculated that within the next two years, AI will be able to “really create” a full movie, revolutionizing the entire Hollywood industry. The director identified the development as positive, though he admitted that the question of how technology could impact the entertainment sphere was “mind-boggling.”
Russo explained that the value of AI-generated filmmaking is the democratization of storytelling, which would allow each person to tell their own story or create a large-scale video game. The AI tool could potentially be directly connected to the streaming platform, from where users could command the system to create a personalized story.
Russo gave an example of a romantic comedy plot where the machine could present a 90-minute rom-com starring the user’s avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photorealistic avatar with dialogue that imitates the user’s voice.
You could walk into your house and say to the AI on your streaming platform. ‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day,’ and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice.
Endgame co-director Joe Russo
The CCO of Epic Games also shared Russo’s optimism for technological advancement. They agreed that AI is “like any new tool or any new way. Artists and crafters will find ways to create amazing new things with this. And it’s really just that, it’s another cool, exciting technology.”
Currently, generative artificial intelligence is not capable of understanding text, let alone editing an entire movie. However, in the not so distant future, it could potentially be capable of much more than what is anticipated today.
And while AI-generated movies graphics are off to a relatively realistic start, there’s still work to do to make the movements of people seamless. There’s also the issue of ghosting, which appears excessive in the early-AI generated content posted for consumer consumption.
In animation, ‘ghosting’ refers to a technique used to create a motion blur effect that simulates the appearance of an object leaving a faint trail or ghost-like image as it moves through space. This technique involves adding transparent frames to an animation sequence, which creates the illusion of motion blur by showing a faint afterimage of the object’s previous position as it moves across the screen.
Right now, the holding of objects or passing through behind or in front of 3-D images is not natural in the AI landscape. This is something that will have to be addressed in order to produce video that in indistinguishable from the standard.
Script writing also is something that programs like Chat GPT are already getting involved with. Right now, the quality of such scripts is rather dubious, but how long will that remain the case? How long before AI understands how to seamlessly create ideas, character flow and narratives that are indistinguishable from human interaction?
Stay tuned. Because we’re about to find out how truly indispensable the Hollywood old-guard really is.
