Runway CEO says AI could help Hollywood make 50 movies instead of one $100 million movie

Cristobal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of AI Runway video generation startup, now valued at North of $5 billionmay not win more hearts and minds The anti-AI creative crowd with its recent comments about the potential of AI in Hollywood.

in Semaphore World Economic Summit This week, an AI executive suggested that studios should take the $100 million they spend on one movie and allocate it to buying 50 films, in order to increase their production and chances of success.

“If you’re spending $100 million on a 90-minute feature film, imagine taking $100 million and spending it on roughly 50 films of the same quality,” Valenzuela said. Same amount of output, visually. But you make room for more content. So you have much better chances of hitting something. “It’s a quantitative problem.”

This goes against the idea that a film represents a studio’s investment in a piece of art, and that filmmaking is where studios win if they back the right creative team. With AI, Valenzuela suggests the entire industry can be reduced to a numbers game — and if it produces enough content, it will eventually succeed.

In his interview, the founder admitted this It was a controversy about bringing AI to a creative market like film and TV production, but stated that “things are changing quickly.” He said he believes a lot of the early skepticism about AI came more from fear and misunderstanding, but now most people understand what these powerful AI tools can do.

It was the company Developing its global models for artificial intelligence It’s to help the creative class do “more work, better, faster,” he said. Runway works with a large number of studios and creators, and the technology is already helping to reduce production costs, the founder claimed.

This is already happening. Take “Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi,” which is expected to cost $70 million, which will be the first studio-quality feature film on the market. Its use of artificial intelligence reduced production costs by an estimated $300 million, TheWrap reported. Amazon has it It also turned to artificial intelligence To reduce production costs for film and television, as well You have studios in India. Sony Pictures said She plans to use it Technology. until James Cameron has come out in support of artificial intelligence As a way to keep blockbuster films in production without laying off workers.

Asked which aspect of the business is seeing a reduction in costs due to AI, Valenzuela said: “It’s everywhere. It’s in the pre-production side, in the scripting, in the planning, in the execution, in the visual effects – and this is already starting to be rolled out on a large scale.”

AI may make it easier to produce more content. But critics question the tech industry’s belief that expanding creativity with AI will automatically lead to more great art.

But Runway believes this to be true.

“There is a creativity crisis in the industry because of the economic incentives for how content is made,” Valenzuela said. He compared video production to something like books, saying that about 25 million books are now produced annually – more than anyone could read.

“Of course, I don’t read 25 million books… but the world is in a much better place because there are more people who are able to tell a story or say something (to the world),” he said.

(For what it’s worth, Valenzuela’s number appears to be wrong. Data from UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization indicates) that 2.2 million new titles are published each year. But it can count self-published e-books and things like Wattpad stories, many of which are now also produced using AI, and are often left out of traditional estimates.)

In any case, the idea is to flood the market with content, even if only some of the content will be a hit. This is what he hopes the film industry will do now, thanks to artificial intelligence.

“We have an internal saying at Runway that the best movies haven’t been made yet because we haven’t heard from probably the billions of people who haven’t had access to this… technology,” Valenzuela said.