Katzenberg Launches AI Studio as Viewers Search for Films Made Without It

The move, reported by TechRadar, comes as an AI-generated trailer, The Gifted, won a competition that puts $2.5 million toward turning it into a feature film. The Future Vision XPRIZE is described as one of the world's largest film competitions for hopeful and optimistic science fiction filmmaking, built around the question of what a future worth building actually looks like.

Audience behaviour points in a different direction. Filmustage, a movie production planning platform, analysed Google Trends data and found the phrase "movies with no AI" rose 345 percent over the past month, while "movies made with AI" rose 112 percent in the same period. The two searches diverge on whether AI is welcome, but both suggest viewers increasingly want to know one thing before they watch: whether AI was involved.

TechRadar's reviewer, who watched The Gifted trailer, wrote that AI is clearly very good at spectacle, including lightning, explosions, collapsing buildings and impossible camera angles, and at lead characters who look almost like famous actors without quite being them. The harder test is whether it can sustain believable characters, performances and emotional continuity for two hours rather than three minutes. The reviewer also recalled watching the pure-AI film Hell Grind in a cinema, saying it held attention through its 90-minute running time but that it worked because it did not try to make its world look real.

Actors have made a similar argument. As Deadline reported, Tom Cruise earned spontaneous applause for a six-minute speech during a BAFTA "Life in Pictures" conversation in London. Cruise said AI "is coming" but that "people want to see real things", adding "There is nothing like human" and citing a summer of blockbuster films as proof that "people want human experience."

Some AI studios frame the technology differently. Kevin Chong, chief commercial officer of Utopai Studios, which creates original films and television series using its own proprietary PAI software, told TechRadar: "We don't think of AI films as a separate genre. AI is another tool filmmakers can use to tell stories, just as visual effects, digital cinematography and virtual production became part of the filmmaking process." Chong said AI can help filmmakers create worlds and reach a scale that would otherwise be difficult or prohibitively expensive, and give creators more choices. On the prospect of replacing performers, he said: "At Utopai Studios, we don't see AI as a replacement for human actors, and that isn't the future we're building toward."

TechRadar concluded that while AI may be economical for production, the search data indicates Hollywood has a branding problem before the AI movie era has properly begun.

Editor's Summary

Jeffrey Katzenberg is launching an AI-focused studio and an AI-generated trailer, The Gifted, has won $2.5 million toward becoming a feature film, while Google Trends data cited by Filmustage shows a 345 percent rise in searches for "movies with no AI." Tom Cruise told a BAFTA audience that AI is coming but that people want human experience, and Utopai Studios says it treats AI as a filmmaking tool rather than a replacement for actors. Whether audiences accept the cost savings executives are counting on will shape how quickly AI production spreads through film and television.