James Cameron is adamant he doesn’t want to take away jobs, but he also wants AI to cut the cost of VFX work in half.
If you sit through a modern, effects-laden blockbuster, then two factors are likely to come into play.
First, given the demands on modern visual effects houses, you’re going to be looking at a credits crawl that comfortably goes past 1,000 people. Secondly, that the cost of the film – certainly if a studio is footing the bill – will regularly exceed $200m. In certain cases, nearly double that (for a feature such as Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, for instance).
Separately, James Cameron has worked his way up the movie industry from one of those names on an end credits crawl. He famously worked on the visuals for Escape From New York for John Carpenter, for instance, and then made a pair of films that warned us of the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Cameron has built a terrific career by taking gambles and huge swings. He’s amassed a wealth comfortably in nine figures by doing so. And he’s now suggesting that AI tools be used to cut the costs of modern blockbuster visual effects in half.
In fairness to James Cameron, who was chatting on the Boz To The Future podcast, he’s adamant that he’s not trying to cut jobs. Instead, he reasons in the chat that to keep the kind of big budget effects movies that Hollywood feasts on, the costs of them have to be cut “in half.”
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“Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
The problem remains, though, that if a studio spends, say, $200m rather than $300m on a blockbuster, a good chunk of that saved $100m would have gone on wages somewhere along the line. There remains a sneaking suspicion that the problem generative AI is trying to solve is the cost of human beings. By the very nature of spending significantly less on a film and replacing human work with computer-generated output, fewer people are going to end up employed.
It’s not as if blockbuster movies are a particularly endangered species anyway. If anything, initiatives to revive mid-budget films in cinemas would be more useful.
Cameron is on the board of Stability AI these days, and so he clearly has skin in the game. I’d just counter that it feels like there’s some ladder-pulling going on here. The solution to improving blockbusters and making them more sustainable might not be in the effects department, either. It might not be removing jobs at the lower end of the food chain, and instead, say, start by lowering the recompense for people at the top of it.
