What a Rotten Streaming Hit and Will Smith’s AI Trouble Tell Us About Hollywood’s Future
What happens when a 2% Rotten Tomatoes film tops the charts and an A-list star gets caught using AI? Hollywood’s reality is stranger than its fiction.
The numbers are in, and it’s official: what I called one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, War of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube, was the fifth most-watched film on streaming TV this week, according to Nielsen data. The other four were all Netflix films, including Happy Gilmore 2 and KPop Demon Hunters. And if you talk to the producer of War of the Worlds, Patrick Aiello, he says that the film is currently the number two most-watched film on Amazon worldwide. So, as I predicted, this film has attained morbid car crash gawker status as people can’t seem to resist taking a peek at the film that has a 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.5-star rating on IMDb.
“It can’t be that bad, right? I mean, it has Ice Cube and Eva Longoria in it, how bad could it be…I have to see this for myself,” is probably the thought process of the average rubbernecker doom-watching this crime against H.G. Wells.
Amazon doesn’t generally release its viewership numbers in the same way that Netflix does, so we only know about its status on the Amazon platform because Aiello—who is probably the producer most U.S. film podcasts would love to interrogate right now—for some reason spoke to a relatively obscure movie buff based in…Denmark?
According to Aiello, the film was originally supposed to be released in theaters (hoo boy, that would have been fun) by Universal Pictures, but ultimately ended up with Amazon Studios. When pressed by the interviewer about the inclusion of Amazon services, logos, drones, more logos, and even an elaborate shopping sequence straight out of a corporate training manual, Aiello claims that the Amazon delivery driver and additional Amazon accoutrements were there before Amazon acquired the film. And he said it with a straight face.
Look, I want to believe him, because I know that making even a terrible film is, believe it or not, still very difficult and a bit of an accomplishment. And excuse me for the hackneyed reference, but I must invoke Shakespeare’s Hamlet and declare that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” with this seemingly transparent interview.
The interviewer, Denmark-based Toni’s Film Club on YouTube, asked all the right questions, but gave zero pushback on answers that were incredibly difficult to take seriously. For example, let’s assume the producer is being truthful, and Amazon services were indeed an integral part of the original script when it was still a Universal project, and not native advertising for Amazon upon acquisition. And let’s acknowledge that at the time of filming, late 2020, Amazon workers, and all delivery workers, took on a bit of a heroic sheen as everyone isolated at home and wondered if this was possibly The End. In that context, an Amazon delivery guy as a heroic character in the film isn’t completely unbelievable.
And assuming the producer could get post-production clearance for the use of the Amazon uniform and logo, it would have been a win-win all around. But it strains credulity that a Universal film would also pimp Amazon services like Prime Air, with a massive Amazon logo filling up the screen, and that Universal would include an actual Amazon website shopping sequence as a key moment in the film. It’s just not believable. But at least now we have an answer, sort of. You can watch the full mea culpa as softball interview here.
I AM AI LEGEND
Will Smith has been busted by the AI police. A recent clip of concert footage Smith posted on Instagram includes two shots that appear to be AI-generated due to inconsistencies and visual distortions. Fans on social media called this out, and some speculated that it was the actor-rapper attempting to make his crowds look larger.
But upon further examination, it looks like Smith doesn’t need to boost his crowd numbers using AI; instead, it appears that someone on his team took still images from his concert and animated them using AI to blend in with other real video. This kind of self-own is nothing new to Smith when it comes to special effects.
Starting around the time he began producing his own films in the early 2000s, Smith went from big-budget sci-fi effects films to downright terrible CGI productions. Some of his most egregious CGI misses are listed in the chart below:
Taking his many CGI fumbles into account, along with this latest AI misstep, I’m confident in predicting that Smith will be one of the first major box office stars to act in and produce a major AI-powered film. This could be good or bad, depending on whether he lets someone else take the VFX curatorial wheel. If it’s Smith, well, we may have to gird ourselves for some weird generative spaghetti-chomping circa 2022 AI.