Though Hollywood has enjoyed some respectable and even surprising returns for small-to-mid-budget movies this year, the sense that they’re still a dying breed persists. The Drama can make $100 million from a modest budget, but it’s no Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Spider-Man can make a billion dollars, and there’s nothing better than that. There have been many reasons for the death of the mid-budget movie—namely, Hollywood studios putting all their chips on Spider-Man movies—but Brad Pitt thinks he’s found an answer that could solve it all. Have you heard of this AI stuff?
This is per Esquire, which posted a lengthy, grape-popping interview with the Oscar winner, who muses on many subjects, including the rise of artificial intelligence and how it could aid the mid-budget movie. Though he admits to “a lot of pushback” against the technology, “AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, forty- to ninety-million-dollar budgeted films, get made.” For his part, Pitt, who, thanks to his production company, Plan B, making the kind of movie in question, knows his way around getting a $90 million movie made, believes AI is a cost-saving technology, which has yet to bear out in reality. (Even Nvidia executives agree that it’s cheaper to have a human do the work than waste all your month “tokenmaxxing.“). Doug Liman’s AI movie about crypto set entirely in a grey void still cost $70 million—marked down from $230 million, which seems like an impossibly high budget for a movie about guys using a computer, but we digress.
Pitt maintains AI’s potential lies in the prompter. “Who’s saying, ‘I want to see this emotion from him,’ and then being able to mine through whatever AI provides and going, ‘More in this direction,’ and tailoring it in that way. So they could, but the final product might not be my choices and what I found and discovered in the thing.” The actor doesn’t really get into specifics, like how much money can really be saved by asking a computer to recreate something over and over until it’s perfect rather than an artist just making the movie, something he shares with the sea of AI boosters populating Hollywood. However, he doesn’t think AI can do anything. For instance, it could never recreate a recent concert he saw: Thom Yorke joining Flea’s jazz band for a few Marvin Gaye covers in Paris. Still, when he’s not getting distracted by the hawks around his house in the interview, he admits AI is “gonna be a very interesting experiment.”
Keep scrolling for more great stories.