Cristóbal Valenzuela, Co-Founder and CEO of AI Video generation startup Runway is currently worth more than $5 billion, but it may not be able to capture the hearts of more people around the world. His recent comments about the potential of AI in Hollywood attracted some anti-AI creatives.
In this week’s Semaphore World Economy, an AI executive suggested that studios should invest the $100 million they spend on one movie into 50 films to increase output and the likelihood of a hit.
“If you spend $100 million to make one 90-minute feature film, imagine spending that $100 million on, say, 50 movies,” Valenzuela said. Visually the same amount of output. But you create more content. So you’re much more likely to hit something. It’s a matter of quantity. ”
This goes against the notion that movies represent a studio’s investment in a work of art, and that studios win in the movie business if they back the right creative team. Valenzuela suggests that with AI, the entire industry could become a numbers game, and that if you create enough content, you’ll eventually succeed.
In an interview, the founder acknowledged that there is controversy around bringing AI into creative markets like film and TV production, but said that “things are changing rapidly.” He believes much of the early skepticism about AI came from fear and misunderstanding, but said most people now understand what these powerful AI tools can do.
The company is developing AI world models to help the creative class “do more, better, faster,” he said. Runway works with a large number of studios and creators, and the founder claimed that the technology is already helping to reduce production costs.
This is already happening. Take, for example, the upcoming $70 million movie Bitcoin: The Killing Satoshi. The film will be the first studio-quality AI feature film to be released on the market. The use of AI reduced production costs from an estimated $300 million, TheWrap reported. Amazon, like Indian studios, has also turned to AI to reduce production costs for film and television. Sony Pictures said it plans to use this technology. Even James Cameron has expressed support for AI as a way to continue producing blockbuster movies without layoffs.
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When asked in which aspects of the business AI is reducing costs, Valenzuela said, “It’s everywhere. It’s on the pre-production side, it’s on the scripting side, it’s in planning, it’s in execution, it’s in visual effects, and we’re already starting to see this implemented at scale.”
AI could make it easier to create more content. But critics are challenging the tech industry’s belief that expanding creativity with AI will automatically produce better art.
But Runway believes this to be true.
“There is a crisis of creativity in the industry because of the economic incentives in how content is produced,” Valenzuela said. He likened the production of videos to books, saying that about 25 million books are now produced each year, which is more than anyone can read.
“Obviously, I’m not reading 25 million books…but the world is in a much better place because there are more people who are able to tell stories and communicate things to the world,” he said.
(By all accounts, Valenzuela’s numbers appear to be wrong. UNESCO data shows that 2.2 million new titles are published each year. But he may also be counting self-published e-books and things like Wattpad stories, many of which are now produced with AI and often excluded from traditional estimates.)
In any case, the idea is to flood the market with content, even if only some of it will be a hit. That’s what he wants the film industry to do too, thanks to AI.
“At Runway, there’s an internal saying that the best movies haven’t been made yet, because the voices of billions of people who probably didn’t have access to this technology haven’t been heard yet,” Valenzuela said.
