{"id":221360,"date":"2026-01-01T08:16:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T08:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/221360\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T08:16:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T08:16:20","slug":"can-charlie-brookers-ai-vision-for-movie-theaters-save-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/221360\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Charlie Brooker\u2019s AI Vision For Movie Theaters Save Cinema?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWelcome to\u00a0Rendering<\/a>, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of\u00a0AI<\/a>\u00a0and showbiz. Rendering examines how\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill.\u00a0Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis edition: Why Black Mirror<\/a> creator Charlie Brooker<\/a>\u2018s idea to deepfake cinemagoers into movies was typically prescient.<\/p>\n

\n\tCharlie Brooker is the grandmaster of predicting how the human experience could be shaped by technology. Whether it\u2019s Domhnall Gleeson\u2019s replicant boyfriend pre-dating grief chatbots, creepy social credits systems, or killer robots, Black Mirror is often the dystopian nightmare we come to recognize in reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWith that in mind, my ears pricked up when Brooker cheerily sketched out an AI vision to boost cinema ticket sales during an on-stage interview in 2025. He proposed scanning the faces of cinemagoers as they enter the theater and then using AI to cast them \u201crandomly\u201d in the actual movie. \u201cSo imagine if you went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark and you don\u2019t know if you\u2019re going to be Indiana Jones, or a melting Nazi,\u201d he told the Edinburgh TV Festival.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis was August. Little more than a month later, OpenAI launched Sora 2, allowing users to insert themselves into infinite movie realms through its \u201cCameos\u201d feature. The results went astoundingly viral. Brooker\u2019s prescience had struck again.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe screenwriter touched on something fundamental about how AI content is being voraciously consumed as novelty. \u201cIt\u2019s telling, isn\u2019t it, that a lot of the AI-generated imagery you see is a remix of other things,\u201d Brooker said. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut does it have the legs to walk into cinema theaters? The technology is there, but it\u2019s fair to say that storytelling and audience expectations are not \u2014 and that\u2019s before you even start considering the ethics for performers and privacy.<\/p>\n

\n\tAttempts to revolutionize the cinema experience through innovation have flopped. Theaters flirted with choose-your-own-adventure<\/a>-style ideas (something Brooker pulled off on Netflix with Bandersnatch), with little traction. 3D is now largely seen as a gimmick. And in 2013, the Dutch film APP allowed users to synchronize and expand the storyline via their phones, but it did not make the switch to Hollywood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPeople just don\u2019t go to the cinema for this stuff,\u201d says Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media at King\u2019s College London. Julian Hanich, professor of film studies at the University of Groningen, is equally skeptical. \u201cThe pleasure of watching a film is partly based on self-extending into a different world,\u201d he explains. \u201cIf you are already part of that world through AI, that\u2019s kind of contradictory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s perhaps instructive that the two exhibition executives approached for this Rendering column did not wish to speak about deepfaking their audience members into works of art. And Brooker would likely be the first to acknowledge the pratfalls of such an endeavor. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut that\u2019s not to say movie studios are dismissing these ideas. The best indication of this was Disney\u2019s shock deal<\/a> to hand over characters from titles like Frozen and Toy Story to Sora, with the best user-generated videos set to be hosted on Disney<\/a>+.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s not quite Brooker\u2019s cinema vision, but who would have predicted at the start of 2025 that Disney superfans could star in AI-generated videos on the Mouse House\u2019s own streaming service? It would have sounded very Black Mirror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to\u00a0Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of\u00a0AI\u00a0and showbiz. Rendering examines how\u00a0artificial intelligence\u00a0is disrupting the entertainment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221361,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,80562,114522,114523,9618,61,60,99335,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-221360","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-black-mirror","12":"tag-black-mirror-bandersnatch","13":"tag-charlie-brooker","14":"tag-disney","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-rendering","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}