AI is a hot topic in Hollywood, but the modern king of horror was still surprised by the backlash he received when he teamed up with Meta.
“We made three AI short films for Meta, and we got trashed on Twitter for doing that,” Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, told Peter Kafka at Business Insider’s “The Long Play” event in San Francisco on Tuesday. “But I learned a lot.”
In October 2024, Meta announced that it would partner with Blumhouse to test a series of AI models to help film production, and Blum said the experience made him less concerned about AI actually replacing filmmakers.
After producing these shorts, he said he was “very confident” that AI wouldn’t create better content “for a long time.”
Generative AI is rapidly advancing, and creepy AI clips of stars like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting have been released, sparking widespread declarations of the death of Hollywood.
Bloom said he believes AI-generated content is more likely to compete with social media scrolling than watching a movie.
“For the first time, I think creators have more to worry about than directors and screenwriters,” he said.
Founded by Blum in 2000, Blumhouse has produced some of the most successful horror series of the 21st century, including Paranormal Activity, Insidious and The Purge, as well as Oscar-winning and critically acclaimed films such as Whiplash and Get Out. His latest film, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, will be released in theaters this Friday.
Blum has been open about the inevitable impact AI will have on Hollywood. He said on Tuesday that while he would like to see AI in film production go away, he knows it’s here to stay, compared to how it resists technology.
“It really bothers me that a lot of people in Hollywood are saying, ‘We’re not doing AI,'” he said, adding, “That’s not going away.”
Blum said he has personally experimented with AI and is trying to make it available as an option to filmmakers interested in using it, calling it a “personal choice.”
“If a director wants to use AI, if a filmmaker, producer, writer wants to use AI, I want my company to be able to provide information on how to do that,” he said.