What Jason Blum Just Said About AI Should Terrify Every Actor in Hollywood
Blumhouse, CAA, and the maker of "Mad Max: Fury Road" agree on one thing: AI is Hollywood’s next cinematic monster.
The Hollywood industrial complex has largely been sanguine and uncharacteristically muted regarding the rapid rise of AI and how it’s poised to change nearly everything about film and TV production. But in an odd confluence of events, three major voices from the film industry made separate statements on the same day about AI in the wake of the flurry of concern around the so-called AI actor that recently garnered headlines.
THE GAMBLER
Jason Blum, the head of indie horror powerhouse Blumhouse (Get Out, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Halloween, Paranormal Activity), fresh off the disappointing box office sequel M3GAN 2.0, offered perhaps the most robust support for AI films I’ve heard from a traditional film producer.
“Whatever you feel about AI, it’s here to stay. It’s very important to use it ethically and legally, and for the studios and the guilds to protect the copyright of the artists,” Blum told Variety on Wednesday. “But if we in Hollywood stick our heads in the sand and don’t use it at all, we’re going to cede content creation to other people. The consumer does not care if what they’re looking at is AI. We’ve got to embrace it, but ethically and legally.”
That second to last sentence is a bombshell statement that will ring in the ears of any in the entertainment cognoscenti who have been trying to ignore AI. Unlike some in the film world who opine that AI films will have limited reach due to audiences desiring the texture, magic, and imperfections of human actors, Blum is already betting on AI as something audiences will eventually embrace. This aligns with something I’ve said here before, which is that the horror genre in particular, along with animation, will likely be first to establish a mainstream theatrical beachhead for AI films.
Blumhouse’s time-tested model for success is rooted in producing horror tales on a shoestring budget, and delivering outsized results at the box office. In the realm of special effects alone, Blumhouse can save millions using AI. But if the production studio decides to also use AI to introduce some new horror character, that would be a major budgetary and aesthetic milestone that would rock the industry.
THE SHERIFF
Part of the “Tilly Norwood” AI actress narrative last week was that the virtual character, or rather its creators, were looking for Hollywood representation. Well, now one of the leading agencies has finally weighed in. CAA, which helps guide the careers of mega film stars including Tom Cruise, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt, Zendaya, Margot Robbie, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett, and many more, made its stance on AI clear on the same day as Blumhouse.
“CAA is unwavering in our commitment to protect our clients and the integrity of their creations. The misuse of new technologies carries consequences that reach far beyond entertainment and media, posing serious and harmful risks to individuals, businesses, and societies globally,” the agency said in a statement published by Deadline.
“It is clear that OpenAI/Sora exposes our clients and their intellectual property to significant risk. The question is, does OpenAI and its partner companies believe that humans, writers, artists, actors, directors, producers, musicians, and athletes deserve to be compensated and credited for the work they create? Or does OpenAI believe they can just steal it, disregarding global copyright principles and blatantly dismissing creators’ rights, as well as the many people and companies who fund the production, creation, and publication of these humans’ work?
“In our opinion, the answer to this question is obvious. Control, permission for use, and compensation is a fundamental right of these workers. Anything less than the protection of creators and their rights is unacceptable. We are open to hearing the solutions that OpenAI has to these critical issues and remain steadfast in our work with intellectual property businesses and leaders, and creative guilds and unions, as well as state and federal legislators and global policymakers, to answer these challenges and set an aligned path for the future.”
This legally terse statement comes after OpenAI launched its Sora 2 app last week by letting users generate AI videos of famous characters without permission. Hilariously, OpenAI instructed (oh, the pluck!) any aggrieved studios to “opt-out” of having their IP included in the Sora app. This created an immediate promotional windfall for the Sora app, with users generating scenes from nearly any famous film and television franchise you can think of, and free promotion for the AI startup. Some assumed OpenAI would keep the transgressive opt-out policy in place, but days later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backtracked and released an update.
“We will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” said Altman on Oct. 3. “We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of ‘interactive fan fiction’ and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).”
Following that, users soon found that many of the famous characters they had been generating on the Sora app were no longer available to produce. This “ask forgiveness, not permission” approach is reminiscent of how YouTube first engaged major IP rights holders during its early days. It’s a clever marketing-meets-managed-legal-risk gambit, and one that seems to be working, since the second part of Altman’s message discussed revenue sharing with IP holders.
The unspoken message being: Make a deal with us, now that you’ve seen what we can do with your IP so easily, or we might keep you mired in court for years as we accrue value and market share. How that deal-under-duress strategy will play out remains to be seen. But CAA’s response to the Sora app release and Altman’s heel turn indicates that the agency understands that, at this point, AI video is here, and now it’s just about securing the right deal for its clients.
THE LEGEND
Possibly the most surprising response to the latest AI video models has been from veteran director George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa, The Witches of Eastwick, Three Thousand Years of Longing). At 80 years old, Miller might be expected to be the fiercest advocate of traditional auteurship versus AI filmmaking. Not so!
“AI is arguably the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image. As a filmmaker, I’ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things,” Miller told The Guardian, also on Wednesday. Miller was speaking ahead of his role as judge in Australia’s Omni AI Film Festival.
“It’s the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about…It strikes me how this debate echoes earlier moments in art history…[The introduction of oil paint during the Renaissance] gave artists the freedom to revise and enhance their work over time,” said Miller. “That shift sparked controversy – some argued that true artists should be able to commit to the canvas without corrections, others embraced the new flexibility… A similar debate unfolded in the mid-19th century with the arrival of photography. Art has to evolve. And while photography became its own form, painting continued. Both changed, but both endured. Art changed.”
Whether you agree with his take or not, it strikes me that his open-minded approach is exactly what allowed him to make Fury Road in his 70s (the best film in the franchise, in my view), a time when many film directors have lost their touch. Miller is more focused on the story rather than the medium. And while it’s true that Miller’s perspective has worked in the past for technological advancements in art, I think AI video is different.
Yes, you can use it to only enhance your films (as Miller did in Furiosa, the sequel to Fury Road), but what companies like OpenAI, Runway, and Google with Veo 3 are looking to do is also replace human actors. It’s well known that some directors see their actors as just another color of paint on their palette as they compose a film, while other directors see their actors as dance partners, vital to the soul of the finished piece. Miller doesn’t make it entirely clear where he stands on this point, but this is the real question that will face Hollywood in the next 24 months (at the latest).
As I outlined in my last entry, SAG-AFTRA actors have just nine months to negotiate a new rights and compensation framework in this strange new unfolding terrain. Will human actors remain crucial to film and TV studios, or a mere luxury, with fully controllable and convincingly real AI “actors” soon available for a fraction of the cost? The answer is probably less binary and more nuanced, depending on the genre.
However, this question is no longer just a concept, it’s a real discussion with legal and economic ramifications. And when film’s elite like Blum, CAA, and Miller all indicate a willingness to work with AI, it’s time for the doubters to come to grips with reality and begin trying to figure out their place in this new version of the entertainment industry.