The AI ‘Star Wars’ Film That Is Giving Hollywood A Wake-Up Call

Making a successful Star Wars film is no mean feat. Just ask Disney. Each of the main instalments in its sci-fi saga had lower takings than its predecessor with this year’s The Mandalorian and Grogu spinoff having the lowest gross of them all at just $340 million. One creator is bucking this trend. His seven Star Wars videos have attracted uniform praise across thousands of comments and amassed 2 million views. What’s more, he didn’t have to film a single scene to do it.

The series of YouTube videos is called ‘Star Wars: Lost Legends’ and it is entirely made with AI. It is perhaps the most conclusive proof that, contrary to popular belief, the caliber of AI videos is down to the creator not the program.

Thanks to the technical wizardry of generative AI, the videos feature photorealistic digital doppelgängers of Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, complete with pitch-perfect recreations of their voices. Set in the era of the beloved original trilogy, rather than Disney’s controversial reboots, it takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

This isn’t just for nostalgia reasons but also because the two movies were separated by a three-year gap during which time fans were starved of content. Unlike the present day, there weren’t any regular streaming shows to satiate their curiosity of what was going on in the Star Wars universe. When Return of the Jedi finally debuted in 1983 it quenched their thirst but left a lot of unanswered questions. Until now.

The story and settings of the Lost Legends are the real stars as they are more true to the sci-fi saga’s original trilogy than any of the more squeaky-clean movies that Disney has made since it bought Star Wars studio Lucasfilm in 2012.

The walls of huts on dusty landscapes in the Lost Legends are weathered, characters’ clothing is visibly dirty from jetting around the galaxy and helmets are battle damaged. It’s a return to the heydays of Star Wars that fans have been clamoring for and it’s perhaps the best example of the beneficial power of AI for the film industry as Star Wars has been in a downward spiral in recent years driven by fans lamenting the new direction of the series.

The Lost Legends series shows that the fundamentals of the franchise are in perfect shape and fans can still be excited by new content. There’s no doubt about that as the five videos have attracted thousands of comments gushing with praise.

“The AI is so good, I feel like I am back in the late 70’s early 1980’s watching a new Star Wars movie,” said one. “This is the kind of Star Wars I wanted more of! This is just more of what I loved as a kid,” added another. “The pacing, the camerawork, the sound design. You nailed not only the look and feel of Star Wars but also professional filmmaking. Incredible. Literally got goosebumps,” was the verdict from a third viewer.

So many of the comments contrasted the videos with Disney’s productions. “Wow wow wow honestly better than anything Disney has done with Star Wars. Just nuts amazing. I’m shocked blown away unbelievable,” said one fan while another got to the heart of the matter with the comment that the series “captures the Star Wars vibe better than recent efforts have, despite the millions spent.”

The Lost Legends videos have quite literally re-energised interest in Star Wars for many of the millions who have watched them and that couldn’t be much further from the ‘slop’ that AI has become famous for. The Lost Legends videos demonstrate that, as with anything artistic, the talent of creator is crucial to success in AI so, ironically, Hollywood has little to fear from the technology.

The slop represents the bulk of AI content, gets all the attention and can be created by anyone but it’s not going to change the future of cinema. The high-caliber shortform videos are at the cutting-edge and producing them requires highly skilled and artistic creators just like any other form of new media technology.

On watching these videos it becomes clear that despite the resistance, AI is likely to be one of the most transformative developments in the history of cinema. It would take teams of hundreds of people months to create the Lost Legends series of videos through traditional methods and would cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. Accordingly, the videos also show that AI will inevitably lead to a loss of jobs in the movie industry which is always the case when ground-breaking technology is introduced. The same was true when robotics replaced stop motion models and when computer animation replaced hand-drawn images.

It’s no wonder there is such a persistent lobbying group against AI within the movie industry but ultimately the cost saving will become too great for studios to ignore. Once one of them profits from it in a movie, others will have no choice but to follow suit. That would be a bonus for studios but it may benefit some movie fans too.

Studios could offer fans an inbuilt editing system to tweak the streamed versions of their movies. If fans of a franchise wanted a different ending or to change a much-maligned scene, they would be able to do it through the power of AI. A failure to offer this kind of feature might lead to fans turning to unofficial AI platforms to create their own scenes, rather than staying in the studio’s own ecosystem. In this scenario, the AI platforms rather than the studios would be the beneficiaries.

Studios’ stockholders would not be happy with that so ultimately they may have no choice to either partner with an AI platform or include this kind of feature themselves. Videogames have been promising interactive movies since the 1990s, but it looks like they are finally almost here.