Hollywood Is Awful, and It’s Getting Worse

Annie Murphy in Black Mirror S6E1, “Joan Is Awful”

If you watched entertainment news this week, you saw two weird events almost simultaneously. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, voted to strike, the day after a spokesperson for the affiliated studio heads announced Hollywood’s intent to simply endure the Writers’ Guild strike until the writers were too broke to negotiate. In response to SAG-AFTRA, a press release postulated several possible studio responses, including performing digital scans on background actors, preserving and reusing their image, uncompensated, forever.

For those playing the home game, this is the premise of “Joan Is Awful,” a Black Mirror episode which distributed on June 15^th—not even thirty full days ago. Though the episode is more complex, the pivotal premise is that everyone, from Hollywood A-listers to seeming nobodies, has signed away their names, life stories, and images. Hidden in “Terms and Conditions” contracts so abstruse that literally nobody can read them, the ironclad clauses prove humiliating.

Simultaneously, my online feed became jammed with the same ad repeated endlessly: trailers for the upcoming Wonka movie. Timothée Chalamet, who recently became the third actor to play Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune, now becomes the third actor to play Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl’s wacky chocolatier and slave-owner. My long-time readers know I despise how risk-averse Hollywood has become, recycling the same piddle while serious writers beg for work. This only proves my point.

When writers demanded pay commensurate with the value they create, defenders of the status quo warned that studios would simply replace writers with artificial intelligence. They weren’t dissuaded by the fact that AI hasn’t yet produced much worth reading, and requires human editors to force the product into a shape. Because AI text generators can currently only create grammatically correct sentences, and cannot judge their own writing holistically, their product is generally rambling and mushy.

Further, AI only outputs what its algorithm generates from its inputs. Text generators like ChatGPT, and image generators like MidJourney, scrape the internet for representative samples, and reassemble the product into something that looks just different enough to sail under copyright guidance. At least currently, writers and artists can maintain their advantage by creating conspicuously new content and constantly breaking new ground, something AI just can’t do. Easier said than done, yes, but still possible.

But I can’t tell whether audiences want anything groundbreaking and innovative. Thanks to Timothée Chalamet’s memorable face, Dune and Wonka currently embody slick franchise redundancy. But Disney, the largest entertainment conglomerate, makes most of its substantial bank on two lucrative properties: Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics. Meanwhile, the second-largest conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, is trying to salvage its would-be tentpole franchise, DC Comics. Studios are banking everything at least for now, on reliable, uncontroversial franchise content.

Timothée Chalamet in an advance promo image from Wonka

Whether audiences want that, however, is questionable. Without Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr., recent MCU box office numbers havebeen lackluster. Lucasfilm properties have been hit-or-miss, especially anything outside Star Wars; the Willow relaunch fared so poorly that Disney flushed it down the memory hole to avoid paying outstanding taxes. Studios create the appearance of demand for lucrative franchises through saturation marketing and media monopoly, but in practice, audiences seem something other than impressed.

The digital solutions which studios propose to overcome this loss don’t look particularly promising, either. Consider the difference between 1994’s Jurassic Park, and the Jurassic World sequels. Though Park was ballyhooed in 1994 for its pioneering CGI imagery, the movie only used about six minutes of digital art, mostly in long shots. By contrast, the latest films consist almost entirely of pixel illustrations. Nearly thirty years later, the original remains eminently watchable. The sequels don’t.

I’ve complained about this before. Much current science fiction and fantasy places human actors centrally, very obviously inside a studio before a chromakey background, then digitally mattes in the surrounding environment later. The product looks exciting when it’s new, but doesn’t bear repeated watching. When studios promise digital actors and AI scripts, they pledge stories stapled together from the undead remains of past success, performed by actors you can’t stand to watch more than once.

Things don’t have to be this way. If studio executives accepted a smidgeon less money, and paid their creative and technical personal commensurate with the value they create, everyone could get back to creating art, and everyone would be happier. But, like President Bush before the second Iraq war, Hollywood execs think technology has made human labor obsolete. President Bush found out how wrong he was, and soon Disney and Netflix will find out, too.