Ron Howard believes there’s a chance AI-generated films could succeed — but only if movie audiences decide they’re worth watching.
Howard spoke during a fireside chat at the Runway AI Festival, the AI company’s content showcase, at New York’s Alice Tully Hall on Thursday evening. The Oscar-winning director of “A Beautiful Mind” and “Frost/Nixon” acknowledged to Runway co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela that the technology has been “democratizing” the filmmaking process, allowing storytellers to “more efficiently, more broadly” tell their stories. But whether those films end up dominating multiplexes will depend on whether audiences have an appetite for them, he said.
“It’s going to be, again, up to the audiences to determine what appeals, what resonates,” Howard said before the crowd of several hundred attendees, acknowledging that creators will have choices between traditional and AI-facilitated production methods.
“It’s going to ultimately be determined by us. What’s worth our time? What are we invested in? What values do we care about?” Howard continued. “Do we care about knowing the alive actors on screen and connecting with them for that reason, or which I think won’t ever go away, but are we also fully willing to invest in characters that are synthetic? There are already CGI characters, there are already animated characters. So, I think the answer is, we don’t really know, but I expect there’s room for all of it.”
