Hollywood’s dirty little secret is that filmmakers do like AI, and they use it to save money.
A finalist in this year’s Reply AI Film Festival competition, Mike Bennion told Semafor he was recently asked to use AI for a Hollywood movie currently in production that was short on cash. “They wanted to see if AI could help fill that gap at a cheaper price,” he said. He didn’t disclose which film or which studio is backing the production, saying he was “sworn to secrecy,” adding that he finds the industry full of hypocrites who use the tech but are reluctant to say how and why they’re deploying it.
Bennion is an AI filmmaker from the UK who will take the stage in Venice this weekend for his film Kev. His festival is just down the canal from the 83-year-old Venice Film Festival, where stars clad in gowns and tuxes will spend Labor Day weekend viewing big-budget premieres like Primetime, the Chris Hansen biopic starring Robert Pattinson, and Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. One will win the Golden Lion. The AI festival’s judges have chosen 10 finalists from a pool of more than 3,000 AI-generated film submissions to premiere at this year’s event.
Catherine Hardwicke, director of Twilight and a juror for this year’s Reply AI Festival, said that Hollywood is abuzz with AI. “Every single director that I’ve talked to in the last few months — some very big, Academy-nominated, big blockbuster directors — everybody’s curious about AI,” she said. And many directors are already using it for backdrops and previsualization, among other use cases, Hardwicke said.
Until now, backlash has been Hollywood’s default stance on AI, as the industry slumped under pressure from entertainment streaming services and soaring production costs. Brady Corbet’s 2024 film The Brutalist was demonized for using AI to enhance the accents of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, and for using the tech to create architectural drawings and buildings in the style of Brody’s character, László Tóth. Corbet issued a statement defending the AI use cases amid swelling online revolt.
Some of Hollywood’s biggest names are starting to embrace the technology: Steven Soderbergh said in April he’d use “a lot of AI” for a film he’s hoping to make about the Spanish-American war, and Darren Aronofsky has launched an AI-focused film studio, Primordial Soup. Even Martin Scorsese is getting in on it: In June, the Oscar-winning director joined the AI firm Black Forest Labs as an adviser.
Some major studios have inked deals to integrate AI into the production process. A24 signed a $75 million deal with Google, and Disney struck a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to license some of its IP for AI video generation product Sora. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos disclosed on the company’s recent earnings callthat AI has been used in about 300 Netflix titles so far this year.
Jacopo Reale, another finalist and a creative director at the Rome-based Labyrinth Studios, an AI production company, said his AI film studio is working on a show for Sky Cinema, a British subscription service owned by Sky Group. Sky Group didn’t respond to Semafor’s request for comment. Reale is no stranger to the backlash: When his first AI-assisted film went viral on X, he received multiple death threats for his use of AI.
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