Posted on 05/27/2026 1:53:42 PM PDT by sphinx
The 2026 Tribeca Festival has set the world premiere of “Dreams of Violets,” a fully AI-generated film produced by studio Fountain 0 aimed at showcasing Iranian civilian resistance.
The film’s premiere at Tribeca marks the first full-length, live-action film generated by AI to be accepted by a marquee film festival, according to Fountain 0.
The project took three months — built entirely using tools such as Kling AI for video generation, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, Google’s Gemini and Nanobanana for research and imagery and Fountain 0’s own technology for blocking and frame accuracy, according to the company — all from Koosha’s home in London. The film was “not a technological exercise,” Koosha said, but a bid to “create a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross.”
(Excerpt) Read more at variety.com ...
Well..... if AI supplied all the “necessary equipment”...../s.
With increasing calls for classic movies and TV shows to be 'altered' to fit our current climate, I want to explain why our entertainment, our art, is not something to be messed with.
I've been concerned over the rise of AI in film-making and then I realize that some of my favorite astronomy-related videos that I veg out to on YouTube as I try to fall to sleep are entirely AI and many of them are quite good.
At the end of the day, just entertain me.
I hear you. There will always be a market for true actors and real directors and film crew; but it will be rarer and harder; much harder.
Can cartoons be live action?
I'm an amateur composer with a few theater scores under my belt. Folks think I should score for movies, but AI is easily taking over that role.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmL31mVx0XA
The upside? Live theater might make a comeback?
Ai will destroy Hollyweird in term of actors and anything else easily produced by Ai, but the problem with Ai when it comes to the arts - movies, writing, music, is that it will put people with zero talent in the drivers seat, the market will be absolutely flooded by the public with absolute mediocre shiet as it’s very cheap to produce. You’re not going to be seeing another “The Godfather” “Casablanca” or “Citizen Kane” the movies will be more like “Plan 9 from outerspace” or “Manos hand of fate” or worse, leftists will be producing movies like “Obama our savior” “Nancy Pelosi mother of humanity”
If one really thinks about your post, the realization comes that the current producers have for many years created using human writers and actors an infinite stream of garbage.
None of that garbage can compare with what was created decades before.
If AI productions are said to be no better than human productions, conversely, it can be stated that human productions are no better than AI productions
Movies going the way of the live theater is the concern people have been raising for several years now. Timothee Chalamet (of all people!!!) tried to make the point a few months ago and got roasted in a classic social media idiocracy outbreak that started with people misinterpreting what he was saying, at which point the nonsense went viral on social media. His expressed concern was that if theatrical exhibition dies and AI takes over — and the two are related — movies with collaborative human input might become a niche product. There will be a market, but whether it will be big enough to support more than micro-budgeted indie films shown in a tiny remnant of arthouse theaters is the question.
The Netflix audience won’t care. Neither will the flying spandex fans.
Oh well. We don’t need any new books either, nor publishing houses, because the libraries already contain more great books than anyone can possibly read. Nor do we need physical libraries any longer — Drag Queen Story Hour notwithstanding — because it can all go online. Big Tech can run that just the way it will run movies.
As you may recall, I rant endlessly that what is happening in movies is part of the same war affecting education, news, publishing and myriad other fields. It’s at the core of the culture war. Movies are just one front.
We can go with the flow. The educational establishment caved faster than Hollywood. The people who run the public schools, at least in the blue states and cities, more often than not are at war with any kind of objective testing because that would expose their malpractice, as well as certain social correlates about which they are in complete denial. So now we have professors even at elite universities sounding the alarm about college student who not only have never read a book but who no longer have the attention span and competence to do so. Doing its part, the College Board periodically renorms its tests to hide the rot, and the last I saw, it is shortening reading comprehension selections to text message length because that’s all a rising college student should be expected to handle.
It’s the way Netflix churns out movies. Netflix knows most of its audience isn’t paying attention anyhow. Netflix also knows many of its viewers no longer have either the patience to sit through a movie that doesn’t give them a dopamine hit every ten minutes or the sophistication to follow careful character building and subtlety. So it is deliberately dumbing stuff down. Just like the schools.
Hey, there’s always TikTok.
So my question remains, in all these domains, is whether we can at least be bothered to recognize, applaud, and perhaps even support (buy a real book, buy a ticket to a good movie in the theater) the saving remnant when we find them.
Here and there, some people still fighting the good fight in all these fields. They’re outnumbered and embattled. They can’t survive in the long run if like minded people simply check out.
I just wish every freeper who rants about nuking Hollywood would at least cancel every streaming subscription. As things stand now, that will likely interfere with watching CFB and the NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. Anyone with an ESPN (owned by Disney) subscription is subsidizing the groomer network. But rather than connect the dots, they rant about Hollywood while paying the House of Mouse to watch SEC football and ESPN’s slice of the professional franchises. And we’re fast reaching the point at which one will have to subscribe to multiple streamers to follow your team through every game, because that market has been sliced, diced, and siloed. Which is exactly what Big Tech has done to the movie business.
At this point, I’m surprised that SEC football uniforms aren’t knockoffs of Marvel Superhero characters, and the SEC trophy would be Mickey on a pedestal throwing a football.
Good movies are still being made. Finding them is the trick. I need to update my list of good, RECENT “conservative” (broadly defined) movies. For 2025, I’ve recommended The Ballad of Wallis Island, The Friend, The Baltimorons, Nouvelle Vague, Sentimental Value, and Hamnet. IMDB also now lists Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die as a 2025 movie based on two festival screenings, although it didn’t reach theaters until January 2026.
You may or may not like any of these movies. Tastes vary. But they aren’t AI slop. Good people in the industry are still trying to make quality movies. I wouldn’t much notice if AI replaced bottom feeders, but I hope we can maintain an ecosystem that lets the saving remnant find room to find an audience. Just as I root for the saving remnant who hang on at Harvard, Yale, Berkley, Stanford, etc.
Or we can hope that this will make the public crave the opposite...perhaps a return to the filmmaking of days of yore - prior to streaming, even prior to all the endless formulaic commercialized reboots...
We can hope.
There has always been the saving remnant who have been sounding the alarm and trying to swim against the tide. They’re still out there, but the streaming ecosystem stacks the deck against them. Beyond that, I think it’s clear the backlash is growing. More and more people are coming around. Whether there are enough of us is the question.
I’m always encouraged by the number of top actors who take time away from big studio projects to do smaller films that are intelligent and depend on good writing and acting, not special effects and adrenalized pacing. The best of the actors are proud of their craft, and they want to ACT. The best writers and directors always push for creative independence ... but tell it to Netflix.
If the streamers become the gatekeepers on both financing and distribution, we’ll remain trapped in the death spiral. A lot of people are looking for exit ramps. But it’s gotten awfully hard. Which is why buying a ticket and watching good movies in theaters (or watching timely on PVOD for those who have aged out of theaters) is important if we want to preserve anything more than formulaic and mediocre made for tv streamer content and AI sludge.
At this point, we are the counterculture. If we want to grow the Resistance, we need to buy some tickets. I know you agree.
Definitely.
What are your thoughts on the Paramount merger?
David Ellison promises to prioritize theatrical releases…
WBD has been passed around like a hot potato for years. My impression is that most people would be happy if WarnerHBO could be stabilized as an independent studio, but no one who has owned it for some time now seems to have confidence about that. It has been a dead man walking. Ellison actually bought the whole company. The alternative was probably for it to be stripped and sold for parts.
Netflix appeared to have the acquisition locked up, but Netflix/Ted Sarandos has been actively hostile to theatrical distribution for years. Sarandos, in fact, has been openly saying that the theaters ought to just go out of business; everything should be on streaming.
When Paramount Skydance upped its bid and got competitive, Sarandos started making some happy talk about Netflix committing to theatrical, but I don’t think anyone believed him. So I was glad to see Paramount Skydance win out, because Ellison does seem serious about wanting theatrical movies.
Paramount Skydance buying WarnerHBO does mean the disappearance of one more of the big legacy studios — but new studios pop up all the time. Technology is making it cheaper and cheaper to actually make movies. If the new company doesn’t hit the ambitious production and theatrical release schedule that Ellison is promising ... well, it just opens up space for the remaining independents to grow, and for new startups to find space.
As long as the festivals and theatrical exhibition remain viable outlets for smaller films to find an audience and grow. That’s the main thing. Lots of people can make movies. Some of them will be good. The chokepoint is financing for anything bigger than a very low budget production, and then distribution.
If the choice is Netflix vs. Paramount Skydance, I’m in favor of the latter. At least the new company won’t be run by someone who has been outspokenly hostile to theatrical exhibition because he is a subscription salesman.
Don’t just watch how Ellison does with his new acquisition. Watch to see if Netflix actually follows through with Sarandos’ last minute chatter, and really does start putting a lot more movies in theaters with reasonable theatrical windows before they go to streaming.
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