Forget Wuthering Heights, Crime 101, and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. The biggest film of the weekend, and perhaps the year, is a 15-second short starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
And it’s shaken Hollywood to its core.
I’m talking about this viral clip shared by Oscar-nominated Irish director Ruairi Robinson in which the Top Gun and Fight Club megastars battle it out on a metropolitan rooftop. The video is a bruising, jaw-dropping showdown between two of modern movies’ brightest luminaries, and it’s taken the internet by storm—and with good reason, since it was produced, in its entirety, by AI.
So polished and lifelike that it’s virtually indistinguishable from reality, Robinson’s short is proof that technology is advancing at such an astronomical rate that we may be mere years (if not months) away from seeing artificial intelligence tools used to craft movies (and TV shows) on par with those of the studios.
An AI capable of generating photorealistic avatars of A-listers (both alive and dead) for large-scale all-CGI features has long been Hollywood’s worst nightmare.
As far back as 1997, when Fred Astaire was resurrected to dance with a vacuum cleaner in a Dirt Devil commercial, this techno-threat has been one of the industry’s primary long-term concerns.
Nonetheless, given that a short film like this wasn’t achievable even a year ago suggests that AI has already reached (or is on the cusp of reaching) its paradigm-shifting inflection point, putting the future of the medium in peril.
If that sounds like hyperbolic doomsaying, consider that AI already plays a prominent role in screenwriting, digital effects, and various behind-the-scenes filmmaking capacities.
What this clip has established is that the tech is just about ready for the big time, and at a cost that makes it available to everyone and anyone with a computer—without the need for participating stars, crews, location permits, or anything else that goes into fashioning a blockbuster.
Is using Cruise and Pitt’s likeness in this way legal? Of course not! And already, the Motion Picture Association has called for Seedance 2.0, the tech company whose platform was used to make the video (and which is owned by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance), to cease this copyright infringement.
Yet the proverbial toothpaste is now forever out of the tube, and it’s simply a matter of time before someone takes things multiple steps further—an opinion that Deadpool & Wolverine screenwriter Rhett Reese espoused in a series of tweets earlier this week that began with the announcement, “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.”
Reese believes that such cheaply accessible AI will eventually be used by some talented but resource-poor filmmaker to fashion a real work of art, and it’s hard to see how that day isn’t fast approaching.
To be sure, technology is only as good as the person wielding it, and legal issues will, in the short term, dissuade many from embarking on DIY features with digital A-lister replicas.
Still, the promise of technology that can let anyone try to be an auteur from the comfort of their home will undoubtedly entice countless budding filmmakers to try their hand at this 21st-century artistry.
The result is that Hollywood is about to face multiple interconnected dilemmas: How does it stop unauthorized users from creating Mission: Impossible 9 and Avengers: Endgame 2 on their laptops while simultaneously figuring out how to utilize the tech in ways that keep it at the forefront of what’s cinematically possible?
And how does it navigate the continued participation of actors who, as evidenced by the recent 2023 SAG strikes, are firmly opposed to signing away their faces and voices for perpetual AI exploitation?
These questions are likely on the minds of every worried studio executive (and artist) in Hollywood today, all of whom are jeopardized by the coming AI revolution.
The answers won’t be easy to come by, but as Cruise vs. Pitt has now conclusively demonstrated, they better arrive soon, before these two and the rest of their fellow movie stars wind up headlining everyone’s homemade films.
