Justin Hackney is used to being ostracized. The movie producer, who played “the Infected Kid” in director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, shadowed Boyle for years and then pivoted into tech halfway through his career, taking roles with OpenAI and ElevenLabs to evangelize the benefits of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in filmmaking and advertising. Friends from the industry stopped talking to him; one ad agency executive had his head in his hands as he listened to one of Hackney’s presentations. “A lot of people hated me, and I do not blame them to be honest,” Hackney tells me.
The film and television industries have vigorously resisted AI out of concern that it replaces scriptwriters, storyboard artists, visual effects experts and more. Highly realistic AI videos such as one showing Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a bare-knuckle fight, made with Chinese AI engine Seedance 2.0, have fanned the flames of worry. On Sunday, Conan O’Brien opened his monologue for the 2026 Oscars by saying he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards.”
Much of the fear is warranted. Concept artists are struggling when studios can cheaply gin up storyboards in minutes. Los Angeles has lost 41,000 film and TV jobs in three years, about a quarter of its entertainment workforce, and DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has said AI would replace most animators. “In the good old days, you might need 500 artists and years to make a world-class animated movie,” he told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in 2023. “I do not think it will take 10 percent of that three years from now,” he added.
However, that does not necessarily mean AI is destroying the art of filmmaking; instead, it could provide opportunities for people who otherwise might not have the means to make movies with seemingly high production values, in much the same way that Alphabet Inc’s YouTube has built a marketplace for creators to make money from content produced on shoestring budgets.
Despite the cold shoulder from his peers, Hackney has delved deeper into the world of artificial filmmaking. Last year, he co-founded Wonder, a London-based production company that funds short films, music videos and TV ads generated with AI. Its financial backers include executives from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, alongside Hollywood veterans such as the former CEO of StudioCanal.
Wonder’s commercial breakthrough came in September last year with the launch of British singer Lewis Capaldi’s music video for Something in the Heavens, which was entirely AI-generated; it has produced a smattering of animated short films and video advertisements.
What YouTube did for distribution, AI is doing for production. While high-end TV and film production might cost about US$500,000 to US$1 million per minute of finished content, Wonder says that AI can bring that down to between US$10,000 and US$20,000 per minute.
The also firm commissions work, taking a 50-50 split on intellectual property after investing a lump sum, such as US$25,000 in a filmmaker. Netflix Inc and other studios typically pay creators on a “cost plus” basis, in which the studio owns all or nearly all of the rights to a creative work. (Star Wars creator George Lucas was a rare exception as a filmmaker who negotiated ownership, becoming a billionaire as a result.)
Wonder, based in a converted East London church, signed a deal with the Swedish author of a children’s book called Maxi and Helium, which had sold 5 million copies. The company turned it into an animated children’s show for YouTube, dubbed into five languages, all via AI. Rather than selling the rights to Disney or Netflix, author Camilla Brinck co-owns the IP with Wonder.
Models such as these could be critical in helping ensure that the flood of new AI films and animations does not bombard us with slop. Filmmakers become more like stakeholders, incentivizing them to care more about quality in a way that someone producing AI content for a flat fee might not.
While AI is hurting background actors and VFX workers, there are some grounds for cautious optimism. The rise of YouTube led to a new economy, adding US$55 billion to the US gross domestic product and supporting the equivalent of 490,000 full-time jobs, according to a 2024 Oxford Economics study commissioned by YouTube.
Disruption hurts, but thoughtful gatekeepers can help it create more jobs than it destroys. Hackney’s days as an industry pariah might be drawing to an end.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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