The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is making Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi with the help of AI. But has he really saved $230m using the tech? Director Doug Liman has made hip indie movies at low price (Swingers, Go) and expensive Hollywood thrillers (The Bourne Identity, Edge Of Tomorrow). Now he’s using AI technology to bring ... The numbers behind director Doug Liman’s new AI movie don’t make sense
The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is making Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi with the help of AI. But has he really saved $230m using the tech?
Director Doug Liman has made hip indie movies at low price (Swingers, Go) and expensive Hollywood thrillers (The Bourne Identity, Edge Of Tomorrow). Now he’s using AI technology to bring down the price of making a starry true-life drama.
Liman’s latest film is called Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, and as explained in a new report at TheWrap, it’s been shot entirely on a soundstage. Much like George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels and ‘digital backlot’ films like Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, backgrounds will be added in post-production – but in a modern twist, these digital backdrops will be generated by an unspecified AI platform ‘trained’ on the virtual set designs created by Liman’s team.
The numbers put out by the film’s producers are rather strange, however. They say that, had Killing Satoshi been made traditionally – with real sets and locations – then the budget would have been $300m. By using AI, the number is said to have been reduced to $70m.
Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi is described as a globe-trotting, high-stakes conspiracy thriller. It’s based on Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for a mysterious figure who created the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and the efforts to uncover his identity. Its stars include Casey Affleck, Gal Gadot and Pete Davidson.
According to Affleck, Liman told him that the film will be a combination of The Big Short and The Wolf Of Wall Street.
Here’s the thing about those two films, though: their budgets were far less than $300m. Martin Scorsese’s scabrous Wolf was shot for $100m and Adam McKay’s bleak financial comedy was made for even less at $50m. They were made over a decade ago, admittedly, but still: they were shot on multiple locations and have, arguably, much bigger stars than Liman’s film.
McKay harnessed the power of Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, to name a few. Scorsese had a DiCaprio. Liman has Wonder Woman and the guy out of Manchester By The Sea.
Unless it features Avengers: Endgame-style special effects, then Killing Satoshi could surely have been made for less than $300m without AI. With careful planning, a financial thriller with no A-list stars could probably have been squeezed out for less than $70m.
Still, Liman and producer Ryan Kavanaugh (formerly of Relativity Media, among other things) are confident that their AI-powered digital backlot will be a success. The CGI backdrops and lighting will they insist, be “100 percent photo-realistic”. TheWrap’s report emerges just a month before the Cannes Film Festival, where Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi will be shopped around to potential distributors.
We’ll be fascinated to find out what they think of it.
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Image credit: Jorge Franganillo, via Wikimedia.org. cc-by-2.0.
