Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column that sits at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you into key battlegrounds and spotlighting the changemakers who are using the technology for better and for worse. Do you have an AI story? Rendering would like to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com.
This edition: Why Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker’s idea to simulate spectators in films was typically prescient.
Charlie Brooker is the great master who predicted how human experience could be shaped by technology. Whether it’s Domhnall Gleeson’s replicant boyfriend, past grief chatbots, creepy social credit systems or killer robots, Black mirror is often the dystopian nightmare we recognize in reality.
With that in mind, my ears perked up when Brooker gleefully sketched out a vision for AI to increase movie ticket sales during an on-stage interview in 2025. He proposed scanning moviegoers’ faces as they enter the theater, then using AI to “randomly” project them into the movie itself. “So imagine if you went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark and you don’t know whether you’re going to be Indiana Jones or a melting Nazi,” he told the Edinburgh Television Festival.
It was in August. Just over a month later, OpenAI released Sora 2, allowing users to insert themselves into infinite cinematic realms with its “Cameos” feature. The results went incredibly viral. Brooker’s prescience had struck again.
The screenwriter touched on something fundamental about how AI content is voraciously consumed as a novelty. “It’s telling, isn’t it, that a lot of the AI-generated imagery you see is a remix of other things,” Brooker said.
But does he have the legs to enter cinemas? The technology is there, but it’s fair to say that the storytelling and audience expectations are not.
Attempts to revolutionize the cinema experience through innovation have failed. Cinemas have flirted with ideas of a choose-your-own-adventure style (something Brooker pulled off on Netflix with Bandersnatch), with little traction. 3D is now largely considered a gimmick. And in 2013, the Dutch film APPLICATION allowed users to sync and expand the storyline through their phones, but it didn’t make it to Hollywood.
“People just don’t go to the cinema for this sort of thing,” says Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media at King’s College London. Julian Hanich, professor of film studies at the University of Groningen, is also skeptical. “Part of the pleasure of watching a film is the extension of oneself into a different world,” he explains. “If you’re already part of this world because of AI, it’s a bit contradictory.”
It is perhaps instructive that the two people responsible for the exhibition contacted each other for this Rendering The column did not want to talk about the profound transformation of its audience members into works of art. And Brooker would probably be the first to recognize the downsides of such an endeavor.
But that doesn’t mean movie studios are rejecting these ideas. The best indication of this is Disney’s shock deal to bring back title characters like Frozen And Toy story in Sora, with the best user-generated videos that will be hosted on Disney+.
It’s not quite Brooker’s cinematic vision, but who would have predicted in early 2025 that Disney superfans would be able to star in AI-generated videos on the Mouse House’s own streaming service? It would have seemed very Black mirror.
