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Hi, this is the Technically Creative Week in Review, week ending September 4th, 2026.
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And I'm tempted to ask the question, what if the answer is just make more movies?
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I think that in the conversation of quantity versus quality, quantity sometimes gets a bit of a bad rap.
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I'm gonna be uncharacteristically optimistic this week, and I don't want you to be alarmed, but I'm also mainly focusing on filmmaking because for once, a bunch of seemingly unrelated stories are pointing in a direction I find properly exciting.
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Yeah.
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And the question I'm asking is, what if we could just make more stuff?
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Not more $250 million movies that need a billion dollars at the global box office just to justify their existence.
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But more movies in general.
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More weird movies.
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More $2 million movies.
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More first-time filmmakers.
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More jobs.
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More stages working.
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More scripts getting out of drawers and actually becoming films.
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Remember the 90s?
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Yeah.
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That.
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But at scale.
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We've spent the last few years talking about an industry in contraction.
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Maybe technology, incentives, and distribution can help us build one that's expanding again.
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And so the first story is that California seemed to finally remember post-production.
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On the state level, California lawmakers passed the state's first standalone post-production tax credit.
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It's $10 million to start, assuming Governor Newsom signs the thing, and it would offer credits of 35% to 50% on qualifying California post-production expenses.
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Crucially, a movie wouldn't even have to shoot in California to qualify.
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Yes, $10 million is pathetic.
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Advocates originally wanted $100 million, which would have been much more appropriate.
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So I'm not impressed with the scale of the commitment, but I'm very impressed by the direction of travel.
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And incidentally, for the amount the state taxes me, I hate it when Sacramento doesn't drop a big fat check to make things better for people.
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But I digress.
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California spent years behaving like the beautiful popular girl in school who believed she'd never stop being invited to the parties.
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We're Hollywood.
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Everybody wants to make movies here.
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All the stars are here.
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Well, increasingly, no, they fucking don't.
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And no, they're fucking not.
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The stars no longer stay because they were equally as unimpressed by the state taxes I just mentioned.
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Productions go where the money can stretch, and incentives work.
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California has already more than doubled its broader film and television tax credit from $330 million to $750 million annually, even though I think that's still not enough.
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And this new proposal finally acknowledges that production isn't the whole industry.
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Editors work here.
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Colorists work here.
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VFX artists work here.
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Sound mixers, composers—
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California's share of U.S. post-production employment fell from 53% in 2005 to 42% in 2025.
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So even though the film's going to shoot in Budapest, we can still bring post-production back to Burbank, right?
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I mean, hey, it's a start.
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And another thing happened last week that was shocking that we all seemed to be agreeing on things.
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Because on a federal level, something theoretically bonkers happened—
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President Trump called on Congress to create a federal film and television production incentive.
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And Adam Schiff and Gavin Newsom agreed with him.
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Schiff literally said he was in a strong agreement with the president, something I never thought I'd hear him say, and called on Republicans and Democrats to work together to get it done.
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Trump, Schiff, Hollywood, Union, Studios, Democrats, Republicans—
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I'm tempted to make a bunch of jokes, but I don't want to because this is the change I want to see in the world.
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Actual bipartisan support for something.
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Not since Kim Kardashian was in the Oval Office talking criminal justice reform has American politics given me such a confusing little flicker of... Are we healing?
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Don't worry, I'm sure it'll go back to being hell in a handbasket by next week.
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But underneath the political weirdness is a genuinely important point.
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We need to update our mental picture of Hollywood.
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Hollywood isn't just in L.A. anymore.
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It's the name we give to the American creative production output.
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Hollywood's in Georgia, New Mexico, New Jersey, Louisiana, New York, red states, blue states, production programs all over the country.
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And they're all competing not only with each other, but with the UK, Canada, and Australia, and loads of other territories that figured out years ago that filmmaking is a highly mobile business full of skilled, well-paid jobs.
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Last year, 45% of U.S. films and scripted television shows were shot internationally.
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up from around 33% in 2022.
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That's the number that should piss you off, because it's long been unfashionable to side with showbiz, even though that showbiz has exported American culture around the world for a century.
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I'd argue it's nearly as responsible, I said nearly, as the U.S. military for American dominance around the world.
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But the truth is, productions go where the economics work.
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Again, we're back to incentives.
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And increasingly, I feel this way about incentives and regulation.
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The world shouldn't have to slow down to the speed of our government.
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Our government needs to speed the fuck up.
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Bernie Sanders just called on everybody to stop AI development.
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That can't happen.
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We need a Congress.
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We need institutions that can make decisions faster, that can spin up faster.
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thought groups without lobbyists getting involved and make a decision.
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Technology moves quickly.
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Capital moves even more quickly.
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Productions move extremely quickly.
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And other countries are making it work while we finish holding hearings about whether we should perhaps consider forming a committee to study the possibility of making the economics work to decide whether further study is required.
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That's why they're beating us.
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I told you I was going to be optimistic this week, but we have the next story is the most optimistic because it starts with Tom Cruise.
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And sure, he's a delusional optimist.
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No surprise there.
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But is he wrong?
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Because Tom Cruise said this week that he believes a combined Paramount and Warner Brothers can deliver David Ellison's promised 30 movies a year.
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Each studio right now does about 15.
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I think Paramount did 13 last year.
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But of course Tom thinks that.
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He's Tom Cruise.
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He's a filmmaker.
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This is Hollywood.
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Delusional optimism is a superpower here.
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And maybe I've been breathing this LA air too long, but I agree with him.
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Actually, I think in five years, 30 will look conservative.
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I'm not suggesting Paramount Warner Brothers can suddenly make 130 conventional studio films a year.
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I'm saying the economics of a certain class of filmmaking may be about to change dramatically.
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And that's a very different proposition.
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Look at what wonder project Luma Labs, AWS, and Innovative Dreams are exploring with real-time hybrid filmmaking.
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Their first project, The Old Stories Moses, stars Ben Kingsley and OT Fagbanal, and was shot entirely on a virtual stage using a workflow that combines performance capture, virtual production, VFX, and generative technology.
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And here's the number that matters from what I'm about to suggest.
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They shot the project in a week.
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Now, I'm not saying this is the future of filmmaking.
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I'm saying it could be the future for a certain class of filmmaking.
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Nobody wants Mission Impossible made in a week on stage seven because an executive discovered a cheaper render pipeline.
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But Hollywood is sitting on an almost incomprehensible amount of unrealized human creativity.
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Far, far more scripts are written than can ever be economically produced in the current system.
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The bottleneck has never been human imagination.
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It was the distribution, then it was the production, and now it's just economics.
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So in that spirit, let's talk some theoretical numbers.
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There's an
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idea that only around 1% of screenplays ever make it to the screen.
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Whether that's true or not, the point is obvious.
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For every film that gets made, there's an enormous pile of human-written stories sitting around unproduced.
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Like I said, all of the output of Hollywood is 15 films per studio a year.
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That's a shockingly low number for all of the spec scripts created every year.
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Now imagine studios deliberately identifying scripts that can work at two to three million and particularly suit a hybrid stage model.
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So this Moses film's shot in a week, but let's be conservative and say it took two weeks.
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There are 26 two-week blocks in a year.
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One stage operating on that model, therefore, has a theoretical capacity of 26 films a year.
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Four stages?
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That's 104 films.
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At $2 million a film, that's $208 million to make 104 films.
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Obviously, the reality will be messier.
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But even if my stupid napkin math is wrong by half, the implication is enormous.
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You could create an entirely new tier of filmmaking for roughly the amount of money spent on one Spider-Man movie and have more films from those four stages than all of Hollywood produces today.
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And before everyone starts screaming, AI, jobs, think about the other side of the equation.
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Think about all the fucking jobs this would create.
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Actors, directors, writers, production designers, virtual production crews, VFX artists, editors, technologists, new roles we haven't even invented yet.
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Training programs for those roles.
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If a stage suddenly supports dozens of productions that otherwise wouldn't have existed at all, the comparison isn't big traditional crew versus smaller AI crew.
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It's movie or no movie.
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I'm pointing at all the scripts that aren't being made and saying, let's make those.
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That's a very different labor equation.
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Now, imagine studios have these stages.
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Film schools have them.
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Regional production centers have them.
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There's a few in Atlanta and Albuquerque, Detroit, London, Manchester.
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That's different perspectives, different stories, more jobs, more writers' work getting made, and more people entering the business.
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I'm not seeing a dearth of creativity in this pipeline.
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Yeah.
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Again, I'm not saying every film should be made this way.
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Please don't email me.
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I'm saying more ways to make more movies could mean more movies getting made.
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And that seems good, right?
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There's a voracious need for content, isn't there?
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So where do we then show all these movies other than on iPhone screens?
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Well, on to my next bit of news.
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AMC has created a distribution business called Leawood Films, aimed at bringing more independently financed and completed movies to theaters.
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AMC isn't planning to finance the films or develop the scripts.
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Filmmakers bring the movie.
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AMC brings the thing that has become incredibly difficult to access without traditional distributors, the screens.
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This isn't entirely out of nowhere.
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AMC got a taste of working around the traditional studio distribution system with Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and Beyonce's Renaissance.
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Those releases showed that a theater chain doesn't necessarily have to sit at the end of the pipe waiting for a major studio to send it something.
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Now, Leawood Films is explicitly moving into scripted features, with people including former Warner Bros. film chief Toby Emmerich involved and advising the venture.
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And this is where it connects directly to the Tom Cruise story.
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If my argument above is even directionally right, and technology enables us to make dramatically more films, distribution becomes the next bottleneck.
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Which is a weird thing to say in a world where I'm gonna put this out and get immediate global distribution in the next hour and a half.
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Well, AMC wants to bring the internet's distribution approach to old-school cinemas.
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We don't need 100 new $2 million movies if the only destination for 97 of them is a thumbnail six rows down on a streaming service.
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We need more routes to audiences as well.
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And I think theatrical distribution itself is going to become more dynamic.
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The physical print bottleneck is already gone.
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Theaters are digital, which probably isn't terribly far away from the systems that make it easier to spin a smaller film up across selected screens based on actual demand.
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A filmmaker proves demand in six cities on a Thursday.
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The film can expand to 50 markets by Sunday.
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Something unexpectedly catches fire in Kansas City?
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Add a screen.
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Want to see Backroom with 30 of your friends next week at your local cinema, even though it's been out of theaters for a month?
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No.
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book it through the app.
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Well, that's not technically what AMC announced this week.
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I'm extrapolating, obviously.
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But once exhibition, distribution, and audience status start talking to each other properly, it feels like an increasingly obvious destination.
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There is, of course, an awkward bit here.
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AMC's biggest suppliers are the studios, and now AMC wants to distribute movies too.
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Isn't that competing with your clients?
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Well, yeah, duh.
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But,
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But honestly, I'm not sure anyone has the luxury of caring that much.
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Theaters need movies.
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Filmmakers need screens.
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Studios need theaters to remain economically viable, so there's somewhere to release their movies.
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Everyone's incentives are strangely aligned around this.
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And that's why I find the Cruise and AMC stories so interesting together.
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New production models potentially make a new class of feature film economically possible.
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New distribution models potentially make it easier for those features to reach actual audiences.
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That's what excites me.
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Not making Avatar for 14 bucks in infracosts, that's fucking boring.
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Making things economically possible that weren't possible before.
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And that's what gets my inner film school geek excited.
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I'm excited for the kid in Milwaukee who never thought film was possible for him.
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That's why we like Kevin Smith's story so much.
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And when we talk about democratizing filmmaking, I'm excited for those weird and wonderful stories.
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I love the 90s.
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And that's because filmmakers started using handicams to make films.
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They started telling stories.
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And people like Darren Aronofsky and Kevin Smith entered the fucking game.
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And it led to one of the eras of filmmaking that was as interesting as the 70s.
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So anyway, that's why I'm excited.
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But on to more news.
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So that's enough for Hollywood.
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But I am going to recap a couple other things I thought were interesting last week.
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Chat GPT Ads has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days.
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That's not $1 billion annually collected in a month.
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To be clear, it's the annualized pace of the current business.
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But still, ChatGPT.
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Jesus, I have used it.
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It's rubbish.
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I spent about $1,000 and got roughly 500 clicks and nothing meaningful out of it.
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Now, that could absolutely be my fault.
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Maybe my ads sucked.
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Maybe I suck.
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But here's what annoyed me.
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ChatGPT didn't tell me that.
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The great promise of an AI-native advertising platform shouldn't be another dashboard where I choose bids and stare sadly at my numbers.
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Google already perfected that particular kind of self-harm.
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Uh...
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I expected the machine to say, Orlando, this isn't working.
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Here's why.
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Here's another creative.
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Here's the audience that's responding.
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We noticed this message could perform better.
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Shall I move the budget over?
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Right now, the experience feels surprisingly like traditional digital advertising with ChatGPT attached as a logo.
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But I know it won't stay that way.
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These things grow, and I'm sure they'll figure it out.
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Because Meta theoretically has an enormous head start.
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It already has one of the world's best advertising targeting systems, and it's developing increasingly powerful generative image and video technology.
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The obvious destination is a system that can eventually make the advertising, test it, hyper-target it, learn from the results, and make another version.
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ChatGPT has something different.
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Extraordinarily explicit intent data.
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And then you've got the holding companies building their own platforms, which raises an uncomfortable question for advertising.
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What?
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If we're heading towards the slopification of advertising, who would you rather get the slop from?
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Meta and OpenAI or Omnicom and WPP?
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I keep thinking of restaurants.
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If there's going to be a burger joint on every corner, I'd rather a McDonald's burger than a Peter Luger's burger.
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Peter Luger may make the better burger, but if I'm standing in Wyoming, I'm considerably more confident McDonald's can deliver basically the same tolerable burger I got in Los Angeles.
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Distribution and repeatability matter.
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Anyway, I'm going to get much deeper into advertising next week because I think this story is about to get much more interesting.
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In other news, and we'll wrap it up here, everybody launched another model last week.
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OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra.
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Anthropic launched a new Cloud model.
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Google launched a new Gemini model.
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Apparently they're amazing.
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Apparently they're dangerous.
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Apparently they're doing things nobody thought was possible.
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Apparently someone somewhere is already making $4 million a week using them, and you're not.
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Uh...
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There are genuine technical advances here.
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I don't want to be too glib.
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OpenAI says Astra has crossed its critical cybersecurity capability threshold, while Google and Anthropic are also pushing further into coding, agents, professional work, blah, blah.
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I just increasingly don't think the new model is better than the old model is interesting news by itself anymore.
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It's probably why they're talking about what a threat these models are, because at least then it becomes news.
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It's becoming like the weather report.
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Models got smarter this week.
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Great.
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They'll probably get smarter next week, too.
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I feel like a caveman who just saw fire for the first time a year ago and has now been shown a lighter and is like, I don't care.
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I can do this with sticks and some kindling.
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What does it matter?
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I mean, it's obviously insane.
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The lighter is fucking incredible.
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I've just become spoiled incredibly quickly.
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Like Shania said, don't impress me much.
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So I don't know, maybe the interesting technology story isn't the technology anymore, and that's what connects all of this for me.
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The model releases are becoming less interesting precisely because the consequences are becoming more interesting.
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Can incentives bring production back?
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Can a federal incentive make the United States more competitive with overseas production centers?
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Can new production methods make an entirely new class of feature economically viable?
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Can AMC give those movies a route to theaters?
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Can AI-native advertising platforms make advertising better rather than just simply making more of it?
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Those are much more interesting questions than whether Model 6.2 beat Model 6.1 on a benchmark 99.7% of normal people have never heard of.
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And unusually, I find myself optimistic about the filmmaking side of this.
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For years, the story has been about contraction.
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But maybe some of these technologies, incentives, and distribution models can be used to produce the opposite.
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More films, more filmmakers, more jobs, more ways into the industry.
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More human written dreams actually making it onto screen.
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That's the version of this future that I'm interested in.
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Not replacing creativity, making more creative work possible for more people.
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One of the things that I've always said is that more people are making money from their creativity, being influencers and shooting things and making little documentaries.
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They're making money in the creative pursuit.
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Now, it may not all be great, but there is a bigger economy for creativity today than there has ever been before.
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And I find it difficult not to be optimistic in the face of that reality.
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I like the idea that there are more people with a lighting kit in their home than there ever was when I was going to film school.
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That means more people think it's possible to be creative as part of their business and as part of their lives.
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That makes me excited.
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So anyway, that's it.
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Thanks so much for listening.
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We'll be back next week.
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Tomorrow's episode is Una Murphy.
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She is the director of the Responsible AI Cultural Leaders Academy at the Arts Council of England.
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It's one of our Future of Life-sponsored episodes.
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I'm very excited.
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She's so smart.
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It's a really great episode.
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Also, check us out on our Substack, where you get a written-up version of this.
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And thank you for listening.
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We really appreciate it, and have a great week.
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Hi, this is the Technically Creative Week in Review, week ending September 4th, 2026.
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And I'm tempted to ask the question, what if the answer is just make more movies?
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I think that in the conversation of quantity versus quality, quantity sometimes gets a bit of a bad rap.
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I'm gonna be uncharacteristically optimistic this week, and I don't want you to be alarmed, but I'm also mainly focusing on filmmaking because for once, a bunch of seemingly unrelated stories are pointing in a direction I find properly exciting.
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Yeah.
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And the question I'm asking is, what if we could just make more stuff?
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Not more $250 million movies that need a billion dollars at the global box office just to justify their existence.
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But more movies in general.
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More weird movies.
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More $2 million movies.
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More first-time filmmakers.
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More jobs.
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More stages working.
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More scripts getting out of drawers and actually becoming films.
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Remember the 90s?
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Yeah.
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That.
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But at scale.
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We've spent the last few years talking about an industry in contraction.
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Maybe technology, incentives, and distribution can help us build one that's expanding again.
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And so the first story is that California seemed to finally remember post-production.
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On the state level, California lawmakers passed the state's first standalone post-production tax credit.
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It's $10 million to start, assuming Governor Newsom signs the thing, and it would offer credits of 35% to 50% on qualifying California post-production expenses.
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Crucially, a movie wouldn't even have to shoot in California to qualify.
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Yes, $10 million is pathetic.
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Advocates originally wanted $100 million, which would have been much more appropriate.
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So I'm not impressed with the scale of the commitment, but I'm very impressed by the direction of travel.
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And incidentally, for the amount the state taxes me, I hate it when Sacramento doesn't drop a big fat check to make things better for people.
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But I digress.
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California spent years behaving like the beautiful popular girl in school who believed she'd never stop being invited to the parties.
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We're Hollywood.
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Everybody wants to make movies here.
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All the stars are here.
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Well, increasingly, no, they fucking don't.
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And no, they're fucking not.
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The stars no longer stay because they were equally as unimpressed by the state taxes I just mentioned.
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Productions go where the money can stretch, and incentives work.
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California has already more than doubled its broader film and television tax credit from $330 million to $750 million annually, even though I think that's still not enough.
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And this new proposal finally acknowledges that production isn't the whole industry.
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Editors work here.
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Colorists work here.
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VFX artists work here.
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Sound mixers, composers—
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California's share of U.S. post-production employment fell from 53% in 2005 to 42% in 2025.
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So even though the film's going to shoot in Budapest, we can still bring post-production back to Burbank, right?
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I mean, hey, it's a start.
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And another thing happened last week that was shocking that we all seemed to be agreeing on things.
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Because on a federal level, something theoretically bonkers happened—
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President Trump called on Congress to create a federal film and television production incentive.
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And Adam Schiff and Gavin Newsom agreed with him.
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Schiff literally said he was in a strong agreement with the president, something I never thought I'd hear him say, and called on Republicans and Democrats to work together to get it done.
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Trump, Schiff, Hollywood, Union, Studios, Democrats, Republicans—
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I'm tempted to make a bunch of jokes, but I don't want to because this is the change I want to see in the world.
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Actual bipartisan support for something.
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Not since Kim Kardashian was in the Oval Office talking criminal justice reform has American politics given me such a confusing little flicker of... Are we healing?
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Don't worry, I'm sure it'll go back to being hell in a handbasket by next week.
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But underneath the political weirdness is a genuinely important point.
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We need to update our mental picture of Hollywood.
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Hollywood isn't just in L.A. anymore.
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It's the name we give to the American creative production output.
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Hollywood's in Georgia, New Mexico, New Jersey, Louisiana, New York, red states, blue states, production programs all over the country.
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And they're all competing not only with each other, but with the UK, Canada, and Australia, and loads of other territories that figured out years ago that filmmaking is a highly mobile business full of skilled, well-paid jobs.
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Last year, 45% of U.S. films and scripted television shows were shot internationally.
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up from around 33% in 2022.
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That's the number that should piss you off, because it's long been unfashionable to side with showbiz, even though that showbiz has exported American culture around the world for a century.
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I'd argue it's nearly as responsible, I said nearly, as the U.S. military for American dominance around the world.
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But the truth is, productions go where the economics work.
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Again, we're back to incentives.
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And increasingly, I feel this way about incentives and regulation.
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The world shouldn't have to slow down to the speed of our government.
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Our government needs to speed the fuck up.
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Bernie Sanders just called on everybody to stop AI development.
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That can't happen.
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We need a Congress.
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We need institutions that can make decisions faster, that can spin up faster.
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thought groups without lobbyists getting involved and make a decision.
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Technology moves quickly.
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Capital moves even more quickly.
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Productions move extremely quickly.
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And other countries are making it work while we finish holding hearings about whether we should perhaps consider forming a committee to study the possibility of making the economics work to decide whether further study is required.
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That's why they're beating us.
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I told you I was going to be optimistic this week, but we have the next story is the most optimistic because it starts with Tom Cruise.
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And sure, he's a delusional optimist.
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No surprise there.
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But is he wrong?
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Because Tom Cruise said this week that he believes a combined Paramount and Warner Brothers can deliver David Ellison's promised 30 movies a year.
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Each studio right now does about 15.
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I think Paramount did 13 last year.
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But of course Tom thinks that.
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He's Tom Cruise.
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He's a filmmaker.
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This is Hollywood.
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Delusional optimism is a superpower here.
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And maybe I've been breathing this LA air too long, but I agree with him.
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Actually, I think in five years, 30 will look conservative.
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I'm not suggesting Paramount Warner Brothers can suddenly make 130 conventional studio films a year.
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I'm saying the economics of a certain class of filmmaking may be about to change dramatically.
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And that's a very different proposition.
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Look at what wonder project Luma Labs, AWS, and Innovative Dreams are exploring with real-time hybrid filmmaking.
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Their first project, The Old Stories Moses, stars Ben Kingsley and OT Fagbanal, and was shot entirely on a virtual stage using a workflow that combines performance capture, virtual production, VFX, and generative technology.
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And here's the number that matters from what I'm about to suggest.
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They shot the project in a week.
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Now, I'm not saying this is the future of filmmaking.
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I'm saying it could be the future for a certain class of filmmaking.
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Nobody wants Mission Impossible made in a week on stage seven because an executive discovered a cheaper render pipeline.
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But Hollywood is sitting on an almost incomprehensible amount of unrealized human creativity.
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Far, far more scripts are written than can ever be economically produced in the current system.
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The bottleneck has never been human imagination.
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It was the distribution, then it was the production, and now it's just economics.
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So in that spirit, let's talk some theoretical numbers.
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There's an
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idea that only around 1% of screenplays ever make it to the screen.
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Whether that's true or not, the point is obvious.
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For every film that gets made, there's an enormous pile of human-written stories sitting around unproduced.
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Like I said, all of the output of Hollywood is 15 films per studio a year.
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That's a shockingly low number for all of the spec scripts created every year.
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Now imagine studios deliberately identifying scripts that can work at two to three million and particularly suit a hybrid stage model.
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So this Moses film's shot in a week, but let's be conservative and say it took two weeks.
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There are 26 two-week blocks in a year.
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One stage operating on that model, therefore, has a theoretical capacity of 26 films a year.
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Four stages?
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That's 104 films.
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At $2 million a film, that's $208 million to make 104 films.
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Obviously, the reality will be messier.
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But even if my stupid napkin math is wrong by half, the implication is enormous.
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You could create an entirely new tier of filmmaking for roughly the amount of money spent on one Spider-Man movie and have more films from those four stages than all of Hollywood produces today.
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And before everyone starts screaming, AI, jobs, think about the other side of the equation.
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Think about all the fucking jobs this would create.
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Actors, directors, writers, production designers, virtual production crews, VFX artists, editors, technologists, new roles we haven't even invented yet.
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Training programs for those roles.
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If a stage suddenly supports dozens of productions that otherwise wouldn't have existed at all, the comparison isn't big traditional crew versus smaller AI crew.
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It's movie or no movie.
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I'm pointing at all the scripts that aren't being made and saying, let's make those.
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That's a very different labor equation.
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Now, imagine studios have these stages.
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Film schools have them.
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Regional production centers have them.
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There's a few in Atlanta and Albuquerque, Detroit, London, Manchester.
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That's different perspectives, different stories, more jobs, more writers' work getting made, and more people entering the business.
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I'm not seeing a dearth of creativity in this pipeline.
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Yeah.
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Again, I'm not saying every film should be made this way.
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Please don't email me.
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I'm saying more ways to make more movies could mean more movies getting made.
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And that seems good, right?
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There's a voracious need for content, isn't there?
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So where do we then show all these movies other than on iPhone screens?
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Well, on to my next bit of news.
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AMC has created a distribution business called Leawood Films, aimed at bringing more independently financed and completed movies to theaters.
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AMC isn't planning to finance the films or develop the scripts.
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Filmmakers bring the movie.
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AMC brings the thing that has become incredibly difficult to access without traditional distributors, the screens.
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This isn't entirely out of nowhere.
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AMC got a taste of working around the traditional studio distribution system with Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and Beyonce's Renaissance.
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Those releases showed that a theater chain doesn't necessarily have to sit at the end of the pipe waiting for a major studio to send it something.
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Now, Leawood Films is explicitly moving into scripted features, with people including former Warner Bros. film chief Toby Emmerich involved and advising the venture.
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And this is where it connects directly to the Tom Cruise story.
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If my argument above is even directionally right, and technology enables us to make dramatically more films, distribution becomes the next bottleneck.
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Which is a weird thing to say in a world where I'm gonna put this out and get immediate global distribution in the next hour and a half.
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Well, AMC wants to bring the internet's distribution approach to old-school cinemas.
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We don't need 100 new $2 million movies if the only destination for 97 of them is a thumbnail six rows down on a streaming service.
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We need more routes to audiences as well.
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And I think theatrical distribution itself is going to become more dynamic.
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The physical print bottleneck is already gone.
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Theaters are digital, which probably isn't terribly far away from the systems that make it easier to spin a smaller film up across selected screens based on actual demand.
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A filmmaker proves demand in six cities on a Thursday.
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The film can expand to 50 markets by Sunday.
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Something unexpectedly catches fire in Kansas City?
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Add a screen.
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Want to see Backroom with 30 of your friends next week at your local cinema, even though it's been out of theaters for a month?
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No.
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book it through the app.
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Well, that's not technically what AMC announced this week.
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I'm extrapolating, obviously.
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But once exhibition, distribution, and audience status start talking to each other properly, it feels like an increasingly obvious destination.
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There is, of course, an awkward bit here.
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AMC's biggest suppliers are the studios, and now AMC wants to distribute movies too.
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Isn't that competing with your clients?
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Well, yeah, duh.
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But,
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But honestly, I'm not sure anyone has the luxury of caring that much.
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Theaters need movies.
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Filmmakers need screens.
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Studios need theaters to remain economically viable, so there's somewhere to release their movies.
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Everyone's incentives are strangely aligned around this.
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And that's why I find the Cruise and AMC stories so interesting together.
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New production models potentially make a new class of feature film economically possible.
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New distribution models potentially make it easier for those features to reach actual audiences.
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That's what excites me.
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Not making Avatar for 14 bucks in infracosts, that's fucking boring.
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Making things economically possible that weren't possible before.
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And that's what gets my inner film school geek excited.
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I'm excited for the kid in Milwaukee who never thought film was possible for him.
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That's why we like Kevin Smith's story so much.
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And when we talk about democratizing filmmaking, I'm excited for those weird and wonderful stories.
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I love the 90s.
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And that's because filmmakers started using handicams to make films.
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They started telling stories.
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And people like Darren Aronofsky and Kevin Smith entered the fucking game.
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And it led to one of the eras of filmmaking that was as interesting as the 70s.
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So anyway, that's why I'm excited.
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But on to more news.
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So that's enough for Hollywood.
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But I am going to recap a couple other things I thought were interesting last week.
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Chat GPT Ads has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days.
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That's not $1 billion annually collected in a month.
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To be clear, it's the annualized pace of the current business.
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But still, ChatGPT.
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Jesus, I have used it.
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It's rubbish.
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I spent about $1,000 and got roughly 500 clicks and nothing meaningful out of it.
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Now, that could absolutely be my fault.
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Maybe my ads sucked.
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Maybe I suck.
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But here's what annoyed me.
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ChatGPT didn't tell me that.
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The great promise of an AI-native advertising platform shouldn't be another dashboard where I choose bids and stare sadly at my numbers.
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Google already perfected that particular kind of self-harm.
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Uh...
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I expected the machine to say, Orlando, this isn't working.
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Here's why.
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Here's another creative.
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Here's the audience that's responding.
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We noticed this message could perform better.
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Shall I move the budget over?
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Right now, the experience feels surprisingly like traditional digital advertising with ChatGPT attached as a logo.
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But I know it won't stay that way.
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These things grow, and I'm sure they'll figure it out.
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Because Meta theoretically has an enormous head start.
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It already has one of the world's best advertising targeting systems, and it's developing increasingly powerful generative image and video technology.
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The obvious destination is a system that can eventually make the advertising, test it, hyper-target it, learn from the results, and make another version.
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ChatGPT has something different.
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Extraordinarily explicit intent data.
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And then you've got the holding companies building their own platforms, which raises an uncomfortable question for advertising.
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What?
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If we're heading towards the slopification of advertising, who would you rather get the slop from?
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Meta and OpenAI or Omnicom and WPP?
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I keep thinking of restaurants.
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If there's going to be a burger joint on every corner, I'd rather a McDonald's burger than a Peter Luger's burger.
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Peter Luger may make the better burger, but if I'm standing in Wyoming, I'm considerably more confident McDonald's can deliver basically the same tolerable burger I got in Los Angeles.
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Distribution and repeatability matter.
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Anyway, I'm going to get much deeper into advertising next week because I think this story is about to get much more interesting.
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In other news, and we'll wrap it up here, everybody launched another model last week.
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OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra.
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Anthropic launched a new Cloud model.
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Google launched a new Gemini model.
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Apparently they're amazing.
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Apparently they're dangerous.
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Apparently they're doing things nobody thought was possible.
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Apparently someone somewhere is already making $4 million a week using them, and you're not.
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Uh...
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There are genuine technical advances here.
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I don't want to be too glib.
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OpenAI says Astra has crossed its critical cybersecurity capability threshold, while Google and Anthropic are also pushing further into coding, agents, professional work, blah, blah.
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I just increasingly don't think the new model is better than the old model is interesting news by itself anymore.
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It's probably why they're talking about what a threat these models are, because at least then it becomes news.
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It's becoming like the weather report.
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Models got smarter this week.
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Great.
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They'll probably get smarter next week, too.
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I feel like a caveman who just saw fire for the first time a year ago and has now been shown a lighter and is like, I don't care.
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I can do this with sticks and some kindling.
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What does it matter?
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I mean, it's obviously insane.
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The lighter is fucking incredible.
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I've just become spoiled incredibly quickly.
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Like Shania said, don't impress me much.
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So I don't know, maybe the interesting technology story isn't the technology anymore, and that's what connects all of this for me.
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The model releases are becoming less interesting precisely because the consequences are becoming more interesting.
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Can incentives bring production back?
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Can a federal incentive make the United States more competitive with overseas production centers?
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Can new production methods make an entirely new class of feature economically viable?
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Can AMC give those movies a route to theaters?
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Can AI-native advertising platforms make advertising better rather than just simply making more of it?
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Those are much more interesting questions than whether Model 6.2 beat Model 6.1 on a benchmark 99.7% of normal people have never heard of.
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And unusually, I find myself optimistic about the filmmaking side of this.
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For years, the story has been about contraction.
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But maybe some of these technologies, incentives, and distribution models can be used to produce the opposite.
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More films, more filmmakers, more jobs, more ways into the industry.
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More human written dreams actually making it onto screen.
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That's the version of this future that I'm interested in.
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Not replacing creativity, making more creative work possible for more people.
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One of the things that I've always said is that more people are making money from their creativity, being influencers and shooting things and making little documentaries.
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They're making money in the creative pursuit.
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Now, it may not all be great, but there is a bigger economy for creativity today than there has ever been before.
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And I find it difficult not to be optimistic in the face of that reality.
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I like the idea that there are more people with a lighting kit in their home than there ever was when I was going to film school.
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That means more people think it's possible to be creative as part of their business and as part of their lives.
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That makes me excited.
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So anyway, that's it.
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Thanks so much for listening.
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We'll be back next week.
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Tomorrow's episode is Una Murphy.
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She is the director of the Responsible AI Cultural Leaders Academy at the Arts Council of England.
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It's one of our Future of Life-sponsored episodes.
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I'm very excited.
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She's so smart.
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It's a really great episode.
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Also, check us out on our Substack, where you get a written-up version of this.
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And thank you for listening.
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We really appreciate it, and have a great week.
