A few weeks ago, I wrote about the derivative nature of today’s media. “That’s why we get Mission Impossible 43 which looks like Bourne 29 which feels just like James Bond 61. We get reboots of any show our parents watched.” Turns out the story is far deeper, more pervasive, and vastly more interesting than I thought. Buckle in folks, we’re going to blow up some set pieces.

Entertainment Strategy Guy who writes an eponymous blog right here on Substack surfaced this incredible confirming stat. At the US box office, 21 of the top 25 films were sequels, reboots or based on popular IP.

This got me daydreaming: What happens when creativity becomes a process?

A friend of a friend of a friend knows an indie studio guy. The kind of person you’d love to ask, “What happens to small studios when movies become derivative?” I typed as fast as I could to get the words down before they were lost. Had I not failed typing in ninth grade, I would have caught even more of it. Here goes…

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Are you looking for me to parrot Eli Wallach’s line from The Holiday about baseball scores on the nightly news? {chuckle} You’re not going to get that.

I don’t greenlight pictures with $300 million production budgets and I don’t have an extra couple of hundred mil more for marketing. We didn’t pay Margot Robbie twelve mil to star in Barbie. The people who star in our movies don’t guest on Fallon. And, our movies don’t top the box office.

We make movies like A Thousand and One. We didn’t make that one. But there’s at least a chance you’ve heard of it. It cost less than a million to make and it grossed nearly four times that. It got written up in Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair because people who watch block busters don’t read a lot of think pieces {chuckle}. Forget baseball scores. In my world, that result is a homerun. It doesn’t matter if you’re Universal or me, movies are a business. Make more than it costs you to make it.

I like people to think of me as a creative type. Specially [sic] out here. I didn’t grow up in Hollywood. I’m from Oklahoma. My dad’s an engineer for an oil company.  I’m not creative. I went to Dornsife. That’s USC’s anthropology school.

I run a business. Just like the big studios do. We’re all looking for the same thing — certainty. We want to take the risk out. They have teams of people. Running numbers. Looking at trends. We have to be more instinctive.

[Must be tough to be the small player in a big space.]

It was. Not any more.

***AI is not just leveling the playing field. It leveled it.***

[You use AI?]

You’re joking, right? Everyone uses AI.

[Scripts?]

So much more than scripts. AI can be an entire studio in my phone. In fact, I’m advising an AI startup. It’s called Office Box Studio. We’re already using the prototype.

Here’s the secret sauce of how a movie gets made. Studios of any size look at what works. That derisks things.

AI can do that for an indie like me. What movies are working? It can analyze markets, social media, all of it to figure out the trends. That’s how creativity becomes a process.

Last year, Barbie was number one. Mario was second. TMNT. Wonka. The AI sees the “derived from kids’ toys/games trend.” We can’t make one of those because they’re too pricey. Special effects. Licensing. Sh*t like that. Office Box looks at what else won and for more trends. Franchise stuff. Hunger Games. Wick. Transformers. Raiders. Same issue for a small guy like me. We don’t own those rights. Can’t afford them.

Don’t worry; it gets better. It found Scream VI. Horror is a genre we can play in. You can create an ax murder. Effects won’t blow the budget.

Next, we get Office Box to analyze scripts in that genre for the past few years. Which movies won? Which ones got social media buzz? Subreddit the scream genre. Then, we tell OB to write us an outline. It’s done in seconds. I can read it and fine tune it just by talking to it. No assh*le telling me it violates the integrity of his characters. {chuckle} I get a storyline I like in a day or so. It would have taken me months to comb this city for a workable script this good. Better, it cost me next-to nothing.

Office Box connects to that new AI thing. That one that makes movies. SOMA. No, SORA. It feeds the script into the SORA. We don’t even have to do that. The prompting is templated for us. It’s more advanced than this, but basically, “Make us a trailer for this movie that can run on TikTok… or Insta.” I have a shareable video before I can have my assistant grab me a cinnamon-dusted kombucha from the hottest new drink truck three blocks away.

A few years back, script sourcing, working with the writer, poster boarding…{pause} could take months and cost us a lot of money. That’s before we have anything we can fund to see if this thing even has a shot.

We share the AI-made trailer. If enough people like it we really consider making it. We take comments from those platforms and feed it back into the Office Box script engine. OB makes a likeable script loveable. One man’s pandering is another man’s optimization.

OB recuts the trailer. It tells us which under the radar stars might like to be in it. That reduces costs. OB sends them the script. OB figures out which bloggers and podcasters will want to talk this up. The trailer goes to them. OB sets up our meetings. An entire studio in a box.

We haven’t made an OB movie. Yet. It’s just a matter of time. We’ve got a few ready to go into production. Like I said, AI didn’t level the playing field. It leveled it.

We’re not going to make Barbie. But we can make Freddie ’77. Give it a couple of years and we could make an Oppenheimer.

That’s not even the crazy part. This is. When we make Freddie ’77 — a horror movie about a prom night that went horribly wrong in 1977 based on the death of disco ironically set to Staying Alive — other AIs will copy us. Everything will be so derivative the only thing new will be comments on Instagram that tweak the script. Which you know will tell us to set Freddie ‘78 at a YMCA. Derivative.

We don’t think we need to worry about AI taking over because we think there’s a line it can’t cross. The line is creation and we know it can’t be creative. But {chuckle} it’s not about creation. Not when 21 of the top 25 movies are copycats. Creativity is risky and studios are not in the risk business. Hollywood is like me. It likes people to think it’s creative. It’s not. It’s a process factory. AI can run processes faster than we can.

If we’re not going to be creative, who will be? People who make ads? Cars? Do financial stuff? Nah. AI is going to replace us all. I get worried we’re going down a very deep, very dark rabbit hole.

[Holy crap!]

Yeah. It’s a crazy new world. But, I’m an anthropologist. I study people. And, I’m a dad. My daughter is fourteen. I worry about what she’s going to do that isn’t going to be wiped out by stuff like Office Box.

And, then, I think of where this started. 21 out of 25 of the top movies last year are just recycled old stuff. The people who will be rock stars in the next generation will be the people who can make the four movies that aren’t just yesterday’s leftovers. They’re the irreplaceable ones.

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Even without the Staying Alive soundtrack, that’s a terrifying story. Here’s the good news. Except for the 21/25 stat, which is very real, the rest of this was just in my head.

So, the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay goes to… me. 😊