If we had AI at our disposal, we would make 50 movies for the price of one. And filmmakers will have a better chance of getting noticed at the box office.
No, I’m not making this up. This is how Cristóbal Valenzuela sees the future of filmmaking. Never heard of him? He is someone who believes that all filmmakers can use AI video generation applications to create 50 movies for the price of one, increasing their chances of hitting the mark at the box office.
Valenzuela appeared to join the pigeons when he was a guest at this week’s Semaphore World Economy event, suggesting that studios should instead spend $100 million on one movie and increase production by developing 50 films instead. Of course, no one asked him why he expected there to be an audience for 50 movies.
Well, you can’t expect him to understand the nuances of filmmaking or the work of some of the greats in film history. Because he happens to be the co-founder and CEO of an AI video generation startup called Runway, which is currently valued at $5 billion. Once an idea gets some backing from a few moneybags, it doesn’t need any further validation…right?
At a time when the entire business fraternity is struggling to find good use cases for artificial intelligence (AI), such as through agent solutions, this idea of automatically creating more movies seems even beyond the realm of science fiction. It’s not because technology can’t do it. Movies are not a medium where quality trumps quantity.
“If you spend $100 million to make one 90-minute feature film, imagine spending that $100 million on 50 movies. You get the same quality, the same amount of visual output. But you create much more content, which means you have a much higher chance of making something a hit. It’s a question of quantity,” Valenzuela said at the conference.
Is he suggesting that AI can be used indiscriminately to create truckloads of content in the hopes that something will work? If so, he should meet the people at Google who are penalizing websites that use AI-generated content.
To give readers an idea of what Runway has been up to lately, the company has developed an AI world model that helps creative teams “do more, better, faster.” The company already has several studios and creators as customers who understand the fact that this technology reduces costs.
Just two months ago, Runway raised $315 million in a Series E round at a $5.3 billion valuation with the idea of pre-training the next generation World Model, an AI system that builds an internal representation of the environment so it can plan future events. You can also think of it as visualizing the future before actually creating it.
While the idea itself is smart and has the potential to push the boundaries of current LLMs, it is too early to talk about the possibility of Valancera rethinking the century-old movie business. After all, his company’s first global model was launched just four months ago. Beating Google and OpenAI on key benchmarks is one thing, but making such a sweeping statement seems ill-timed.
And there’s more to it than the fact that Runway itself, despite historically having connections with customers in the media, entertainment and advertising businesses, has announced its intention to use the first-ever global model across other sectors such as healthcare, climate technology, energy and robotics.
Not only did Valenzuela enter the nest of creation, but he also tried to disturb that peace by implying that those skeptical of AI’s power were actually afraid of it. When you’re in the creative space and your goal is to acquire new customers, being condescending is the worst thing you can do.
Everyone acknowledges the fact that the use of AI can reduce production costs, as some production companies like Amazon are doing through their studios in India. The same is true for Sony Pictures and many other companies. In fact, even ace director James Cameron supports AI as a way to make bigger blockbusters without cutting staff.
That’s not to say that runway solutions have no value in filmmaking. For example, the company’s GWM-Worlds app creates an interactive project that allows users to generate a visualized world through a few prompts and image references. This model works by understanding geometry, physics, and lighting, making it useful for multiple use cases, including games.
Runway also builds realistic avatars through GWM-Avatars, which simulates human behavior. This is somewhat similar to what Google has done in the past, and what other companies like New Zealand-based Soul Machines have done. In the future, there could be absolute synergy between what Valenzuela is creating and the world of robotics and Avatar.
Additionally, the company also enables the generation of native audio and long multi-shots with its AI models, allowing it to generate one-minute videos with character consistency, native dialogue, background audio, and complex multi-angle shots. Of course, Runway isn’t the only company working on creating great videos.
Kling recently launched a video suite that allows for “simultaneous audio and video generation.” This has the potential to transform the workflow of the traditional AI video production model of manually dubbing after silent footage. This product is owned by Kuaishou Technology, based in Hong Kong. Kling and Runway are both pioneering a new era of production-ready tools that make filmmaking easier.
When Valenzuela made that bombastic statement, audiences wanted to know which side of film production was seeing costs drop due to AI. The Runway co-founder went a step further and claimed that costs were incurred everywhere from pre-production to scripting, planning, execution, visual effects, and more.
What he was missing here is that movies have to appeal to the emotional side of the people who pay for a ticket or watch on a streaming platform. And if there’s one thing AI doesn’t understand (at least until now), it’s emotional quotient.
But Valenzuela believes the movie business is already facing a crisis of creativity. His example was as much a joke as the idea of filmmaking. 25 million books are written each year, more than anyone can read. But the more people tell stories and share things with the world, the better the world becomes.
What he doesn’t mention is that authors write books with passion, and the desire to communicate their ideas to the world cannot be achieved by any AI engine. At best, it simplifies the process and reduces the effort of quality checks through familiarity with the language. According to Valenzuela, the best movies and books aren’t being written because people’s minds don’t have access to technology.
By that logic, without ChatGPT to generate the recipes, even the best dishes may not have been made to this day. Wake up, Mr. Valenzuela…technology is not the soul of humanity, but an assistant. And movies convey that spirit to the world. So the answer is not just to make 50 movies instead of one. Not convinced? Ask Google.
