Ashton Kutcher is envisioning a world where everyone is a filmmaker. Or perhaps it is one in which no one but OpenAI‘s Sora is a filmmaker.
In conversation with Eric Schmidt for the Berggruen Institute, Kutcher credited the new beta version of Sora for inspiring higher-quality content and democratizing filmmaking…just, you know, without actual writers, directors, camera people, actors, stunt people…
“I’ve been playing around with Sora, this latest thing that OpenAI launched that generates video. I have a beta version of it and it’s pretty amazing,” Kutcher said. “It’s pretty good, and you can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real. It still makes mistakes. It still doesn’t quite understand physics. But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds. In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
Kutcher pointed to the cost effectiveness of using Sora for exterior shots, even compared with CGI.
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher said. “Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [digitally].”
The “That ’90s Show” star gave an example of a short film he made with Sora of an ultramarathoner running across the desert and being chased by a sandstorm.
“I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it. I, in five minutes, rendered a video [of it]. And it looks exactly like that,” Kutcher said. “So fast forward and let’s go 30 times more performant. You’ll be able to render a whole movie. You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie.”
Awesome, Ashton.
And if everyone can create their own films — which by the way, Sean Baker already proved anyone with an iPhone can do already — Kutcher predicted that Sora will actually boost the quality of Hollywood features.
“So instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie,” Kutcher said. “What’s going to happen is there is going to be more content than there are eyeballs on the planet to consume it. So any one piece of content is only going to be as valuable as you can get people to consume it. And so, thus the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something being good, the bar is going to have to go way up, because why are you going to watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
Not everyone is as thrilled about Sora as Ashton. Earlier in 2024, mega-producer Tyler Perry announced that he scrapped $800 million plans to expand his Atlanta-based studio after realizing what text-to-video model was capable of.
“If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing,” Perry told The Hollywood Reporter. “If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me. […] It makes me worry so much about all of the people in the business. Because as I was looking at it, I immediately started thinking of everyone in the industry who would be affected by this, including actors and grip and electric and transportation and sound and editors, and looking at this, I’m thinking this will touch every corner of our industry.”
