Ben Affleck is never one to shy away from speaking his mind, and during a panel at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Summit on Wednesday, he weighed in on a number of topics closely watched by Hollywood, including Paramount’s deal to buy Sky Dance and the industry’s growing use of creative artificial intelligence.
Affleck, of course, is the co-founder and CEO of Artist Equity, the production venture he created with Matt Damon and RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale. Cardinale, who sat alongside Affleck on the CNBC panel, is also backing David Ellison’s bid for Paramount.
Cardinale disclosed the financials for Artist Equity for the first time, telling David Faber that “We have pre-sold seven projects in revenue of $700 million. We are meaningfully cash flow positive. We have two years of I have created a company.
But Affleck lamented that creative work has become more challenging given the fierce competition for consumers’ time.
“It’s a little bit harder to do now. You actually have to be a little bit more complete, consumers have more options. They don’t just have three networks, they don’t just have a few studios,” he said. . “YouTube is kicking people’s ass. You can watch so many things. It’s so spread out, so you have to work harder and you have to be better. You have to have better managers, You have to be the best executive, you have to work with the best talent and you have to have the most toughness.
“Labor is feeling the rollback. Talent, if you look at the news, the incomes of actors, writers, directors, are feeling the rollback,” Affleck added. “Usually the last group to feel this is the executive class. But it has to come, it just happens, if you want justice.
But he added that he was hopeful that a young Paramount under Ellison would turn things around.
“Before Gulf and Western bought Paramount, the original studios were Harry and Jack Warner. These guys, they were the owners, the operators, the founders,” Affleck said. “They cared about stories, and that’s what they created, and then they sold them to other companies and sold them to other companies, and at the heart of it was a huge gap between people, stories. Care to tell and those who saw them as valuable businesses to invest in. Now, in the case of public companies, you have a different kind of management The management class is there and they have different incentives in play.
Allison and Cardinale, by contrast, are “not management class.”
“They’re going to look at it very differently as someone who’s invested as an owner,” he added. “How many public companies are there that are run by the owners? And Hollywood needs more strong institutions like Paramount. It’s bad for business when competition dies out, when it turns into oligopolies. That doesn’t work either. And there’s a lot of money to be made in the linear studio space. I’d love to be in that ecosystem and say, yeah, there’s going to be some tough choices But there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of money to be made.”
And the pair focused on the use of creative AI, with Cardinale calling it “a tool in the toolbox that will bring intellectual property back to life.”
“You’ll create more intellectual property, more original content at half the cost,” he said. “Now, there will be displacement along the way, but that’s a positive thing.”
Affleck was upbeat about the tech’s potential and somewhat dismissive of its impact on the film business, though he acknowledged that some parts of the business would be hit hard.
“Movies will be one of the last things, if everything is changed, to be replaced by AI. AI can write you the best imitation verse, which is an Elizabethan voice. It doesn’t write you Shakespeare. could,” Affleck said. “The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and understanding and building that flavor is something that completely overwhelms the ability of AI right now and I think will for a significant period of time. ”
“What AI is going to do is eliminate the more laborious, less creative and more expensive aspects of filmmaking which will allow for lower costs, which will lower the barrier to entry, which will will be heard more than, that it will make it easier for people who want to go out and create,” he adds. “Look, AI is a craftsman at best. Artisans can learn to make stickle furniture by sitting next to someone and seeing what their technique is and copying. This is how large video models and large language models work primarily. A library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it in context, right? But those are the only cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.”
“Artisan knows how to work. Art knows when to stop,” Affleck continued. “I think knowing when to stop is going to be very difficult for AI to learn because it has taste. And the lack of consistency, the lack of control, the lack of quality. AI, for this world of creative video, is important. going to do more—I wouldn’t like to be in the visual effects business. They’re in trouble because anything that costs a lot of money will cost a lot less now, and it’s going to hammer the place. And it already is. And it might not take a thousand people to make movies, but it won’t replace the people who make the movies.
In fact, Affleck likened AI to the DVD business, a potential revenue generator.
“Eventually AI will allow you to ask for your own episode, where you can say, I’ll pay $30, and can you make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and goes away. He has an affair with Steve? It’s going to be a little weird, but it’s going to remix it in effect,” Affleck said . “That’s the value, in my view, of AI long-term for consumers, which is ultimately my hope for AI to be an additional revenue stream that can replace DVD, which has fueled the filmmaking economy. contributed 15-20 percent.”
Credit : www.hollywoodreporter.com
