For all the noise that’s been made about how generative AI is poised to revolutionize the filmmaking industry, there haven’t really been any projects created with the technology that felt like the sort of entertainment people would pay to see. Most AI firms’ video models are still only capable of churning out short bursts of visually inconsistent footage. And some of Hollywood’s biggest AI partnerships have suddenly evaporated in ways that make it seem like studios might not be able to rely on the new technology coming out of Silicon Valley. For the most part, short-form video slop appears to be the only thing that major production houses are capable of cooking up with gen AI. But that could change if studios take notes from some of the experimental projects that debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. 

Though it feels unlikely that gen AI will ever be able to whip up a compelling movie whole cloth, Tribeca featured a number of films that demonstrated how human artists can leverage the technology in compelling ways. 

While none of the AI-powered movies that screened at Tribeca were as terrible as the video slop companies like OpenAI and xAI have polluted the internet with, some of the projects were prime examples of why generative content tends to feel so lifeless compared to human-crafted art. Roar — an animated short produced by Illuminai Studios — felt more like a disorienting montage of AI-generated clips rather than a cohesive piece of cinema. And Asteria Film Co.’s ChikaBOOM! lacked the visual and sonic polish that’s necessary for fast-paced fantasy about a magician in training to really pull you in. 

Roar and ChikaBOOM!’s overall roughness seemed to be a reflection of the inherent technological limitations baked into their respective AI-forward production workflows. But other films, like Google DeepMind’s Dear Upstairs Neighbors and OpenAI’s Mauvais Soleil, showcased how it’s possible for filmmakers to avoid those challenges when gen AI is deployed with a bit more ingenuity.

Written and directed by Pixar veteran Connie Qin He in collaboration with researchers from Google DeepMind, Dear Upstairs Neighbors tells the story of an exhausted young woman who’s trying to go to bed. All Ada (Márcia Mayer, who also produced the short) wants is to get a couple hours of peaceful rest before she has to wake up and get back to work. But every time she begins dozing off, the cacophony of noise coming from her upstairs neighbors’ apartment jolts her awake and leaves her wondering what they could possibly be doing in the middle of the night.

To give Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ world a distinct style, He enlisted Pixar production designer Yingzong Xin, who painted concept art in Photoshop and on paper using acrylics. Those illustrations’ expressionistic aesthetic was key to bringing Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ fantastical story to life, but it also presented a unique challenge to DeepMind’s researchers. With most AI video generation models, the illustrations’ painterly style would be difficult to turn into visually consistent footage. But DeepMind’s engineers developed custom versions of Veo and Imagen that were specifically designed to give Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ artists the ability to fine-tune their outputs. 

Because the customized models were trained on Xin’s concept art, they could consistently generate shots that adhered to He’s vision for the project. The text-to-video models were great at reproducing certain stylistic details, like the way sound is visualized when objects interact with one another. But to really build Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ scenes in a way that would tell a cohesive story, the short’s creative team had to do things a bit more traditionally. By creating rough animations with Autodesk Maya (the industry standard for 3D rigging and VFX), Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ production team could ensure that scenes would unfold exactly how they wanted them to. And by feeding those roughs into Veo, the artists could create scenes that were more visually polished and ready to be further enhanced with additional stylized assets generated with Veo and Imagen.

More than any other film at Tribeca, Dear Upstairs Neighbors felt like a case study in how generative AI can be used as a bespoke tool that actually assists artists as they develop their ideas. The film’s entire workflow relied on human-made art and people making the kinds of nuanced creative decisions that text-to-video generators aren’t capable of on their own. It’s important to bear in mind that Dear Upstairs Neighbors would not be nearly as visually impressive if it had been produced with vanilla versions of Google’s various models. The models worked well for this particular short, but that’s to be expected for a project that’s also very much a commercial for Google’s technology.

Dear Upstairs Neighbors was a much more enjoyable watch than the films OpenAI brought to this year’s festival. Alice Gu’s semi-autobiographical drama Smoked used Sora to re-create the Palisades Fire, and Youssef Michraf’s Mauvais Soleil features a number of photorealistic scenes generated with OpenAI’s creative tools. Watching both films, you could see how their respective filmmakers had to work around some of gen AI’s more typical limitations. Wide shots in Smoked’s fiery scenes looked a bit cartoony, but the effect worked somewhat better in close-ups — which were filmed using a Volume-like setup — of a woman and her son trying to escape the blaze in their car. Most of Mauvais Soleil’s shots last for just a few seconds and the only speaking character is an unseen narrator, but the film’s story about how a man’s life is being warped by artificial intelligence makes those details feel like intentional artistic choices.

OpenAI’s presence at Tribeca was somewhat surprising given the company’s recent decision to shut Sora down entirely. Sora’s sudden shuttering is what led to OpenAI’s feature-length film Critterz not being able to make its debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It seems like OpenAI might be pivoting away from video-focused applications of its tech, but there are still other players in the gen AI space building tools that filmmakers can use to realize their projects.

With just $2,000 spent entirely on computing costs, writer / director Ash Koosha was able to singlehandedly produce Dreams of Violets, a docudrama focused on the nationwide protests that have rocked Iran throughout the past year. Using Kling AI, Claude, Gemini, and Nano Banana, Koosha tells a fictionalized story about a group of people who find themselves trapped in an alley as police stalk the streets brutalizing civilians. The project took Koosha just a few weeks to finish by himself, and while it’s supported by a powerful narrative, it doesn’t break any ground visually.

Watching all of these films, I got the distinct sense that there is no future where studios are cranking out commercially viable projects by feeding prompts to gen AI models. That kind of content probably isn’t going to go away, but it’s not the kind of stuff Hollywood’s heavyweights would want to put their names on. What seems much more likely is bigger AI firms like Google partnering with studios to build bespoke models that are tailored to very specific workflows. And those workflows really only function well when they’re guided by human artists with very clear creative visions.

Though YouTube has always been a place where up-and-coming artists could be discovered and make it big, in recent years the platform has become a launching pad for some of Hollywood’s most exciting new horror directors. The filmmakers behind films like Talk to Me, Iron Lung, and Obsession all started off as content creators posting their independently created projects online. And if it weren’t for their fandom-fueled internet fame, studios might not have given them a chance to step up to the big leagues.

Going viral on YouTube with a series of videos inspired by 4chan memes is what put Kane Parsons on A24’s radar and led to him becoming the director of the studio’s latest movie, Backrooms. Everything about Backrooms — from its unsettling aesthetic to the way its script (written by Will Soodik) leaves you in the dark about what’s really going on — feels emblematic of this new generation of horror auteurs who grew up and found their creative voices on sites like YouTube.

During a recent conversation, Parsons told me that one of the most challenging things about bringing Backrooms to the big screen was embracing the fact that he needed to tell a story that could resonate with people who haven’t been following his work from day one. Though Parsons knew that longtime fans might show up expecting a deep dive into intricate Backrooms lore, his time on YouTube taught him that playing solely to that crowd can be a double-edged sword.

“With films like Backrooms that started off as YouTube projects, you have to really reflect on what worked in the first place in order to avoid making something that’s too contrived and dense for newcomers to enjoy,” Parsons explained. “That inaccessibility issue stems from the fact that so many of these projects are independently developed and largely controlled by individual people. You frequently see the ways in which creators can let online engagement affect them personally and affect the way they make things.”

Like Parsons’ shorts — there are 22 of them, and the first was uploaded in 2022 — Backrooms tells the disturbing story of what happens when people unknowingly stumble into an extradimensional space that looks like a sprawling maze of seemingly abandoned office building hallways. After a furniture salesman (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a portal to the Backrooms beneath his failing store, he becomes obsessed with figuring out what the place is and why it’s filled with objects that appear to be human-made. But the more time the man spends in the place, the more his grasp on reality starts to slip.

Like a lot of other recent theatrical horrors, Backrooms could be fairly described as a vibe-forward sort of film that puts more emphasis on conjuring a discomfiting atmosphere as opposed to giving you a clear understanding of what’s happening to its characters. That mode of storytelling works especially well for short-form YouTube videos that viewers can pause, rewind, and pore over in excited anticipation of a creator’s next upload. But Parsons felt that it was important for the film to have a stronger and more concrete narrative center in order for it to work for theatergoers.

“Emotionally, I started from a place of wanting to capture what the Backrooms are while making sure that I wasn’t overwhelming the audience by showing them all of the various Backrooms biomes you see in my series,” Parsons said. “People who have watched all of my Backrooms videos are fine if I want to do a whole video where you don’t see any yellow wallpaper because they already have a larger understanding of the space. But for the film, I wanted to make sure I was returning to form and replicating what worked about that first short.”

The reasoning behind studios’ decisions to greenlight projects like Backrooms is simple enough to understand. Horror films tend to be cheap to produce, and if they wind up being hits, studios can easily recoup their production costs many times over (Backrooms reportedly cost $10 million to make and is on track to rake in $45 million in its first weekend.) When young filmmakers show up with sizable, built-in fan bases, executives see them as safer bets. A combination of those factors is what led to A24 bringing Parsons on board, and the studio is clearly hoping that Backrooms will become another testament to low-budget horror’s ability to dominate at the box office.

Before Backrooms, Danny and Michael Philippou’s first Talk to Me film (a sequel, Talk 2 Me, is currently in development) ultimately made just under $92 million against a $4.5 million micro-budget, while Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s independently produced Iron Lung — an adaptation of David Szymanski’s 2022 video game — netted an impressive $50 million while holding its own against more expensive features like Sam Raimi’s Send Help. These films are making a mark during a booming time for the genre, where the likes of Ti West’s X series, Longlegs, and Weapons have made it clear that audiences will flock to see low-budget horror.

Though Parsons knows that his YouTube fame is part of what helped him get his foot in the door, growing up in the age of content creators taught him how important it is to maintain a certain level of distance from online discourse about his work. Before Parsons was making videos of his own, he was a subscriber to channels like The Film Theorists, which gave him a deep understanding of how fans’ intensity can be a blessing and a curse for the creators they fixate on.

“My entire experience with the internet has been channels where people put so much energy into media analysis in a very decentralized, scattered way,” Parsons said. “And when you have tons of people who hang on the tiniest details in your story, it can end up creating and reinforcing an unhealthy feedback loop where a creator feels the need to disproportionately cater to their fans because that’s where the positive feedback is coming from.”

While the obsessive energy that defines so much of modern fandom often gives Parsons pause, he still feels YouTube is a place where aspiring artists can find their voices and hone their craft. Some of “the most talented artists” Parsons knows are “random people from Discord who are, like, 14-year-olds who are not working in the industry at all, but they’re fucking wizards.” Parsons believes that the entertainment industry would deeply benefit from capitalizing on more of that youthful wizardry, but he also told me that he refuses to “preach the blind optimism that I hear from a lot of other filmmakers who say, ‘You got a phone; everyone can be a filmmaker now.’” YouTube remains an important platform for being discovered, but it’s also becoming increasingly challenging to get noticed.

“About 50 percent of the internet traffic is now not even human, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re all still here and I don’t think people are fully dropping off the internet,” Parsons said. “But the YouTube algorithm is not your friend. These platforms are increasingly becoming more and more botted, atomized, and just not user-friendly, and I think it would be very dishonest to claim otherwise.”

Backrooms is in theaters now.

After years of it seeming like the Spider-Man film rights might be better off in Marvel’s hands alone, Into the Spider-Verse came along and proved that Sony was still capable of telling phenomenal stories featuring everyone’s favorite webhead. Into the Spider-Verse’s sumptuous visuals and focus on a different web-slinging New Yorker made it unlike any other Spider-Man adaptation. And it was genuinely shocking to see Sony follow the film up with a bigger, bolder, more imaginative sequel just a few years later.

Part of what made the first two Spider-Verse features so much fun to watch was the way they cleverly incorporated many of the lesser-known Spider-people Sony can legally use in its projects. Normies (read: people who don’t read comics) came to love Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Gwen, John Mulaney’s Spider-Ham, and Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Noir. And Sony took the films’ success as a sign that it could re-create a similar kind of magic with other characters who exist in Spider-Man’s orbit, like Venom and Madame Web, with varying levels of success.
Amazon’s live-action Spider-Noir series is Sony’s latest attempt at cashing in on the Spider-Man name independent of Marvel. In addition to being a comedy with very loose ties to the Spider-Verse films, the show is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the hard-boiled crime dramas that dominated Hollywood’s Golden Age. Aesthetically, Spider-Noir is a charming delight — particularly when you watch it in black and white (there’s also a colorized version). But the series is so lacking in narrative substance that it feels like Sony has lost sight of what made its most successful Spider-Man projects shine.

Rather than bringing Cage back to portray a flesh-and-blood version of his monochromatic Spider-Verse hero, Spider-Noir centers Ben Reilly — a brooding vigilante from yet another universe who the citizens of New York City know best as “The Spider.” Though fighting crime with his superpowers once gave Reilly a sense of purpose, the tragic death of his girlfriend drives him to leave the hero life behind in favor of becoming a private investigator.

After five years of working with Reilly, his secretary Janet (Karen Rodriguez) knows about his uncanny ability to sense danger and his knack for snapping photos, but he’s also been slacking when it comes to bringing in new clients and hasn’t paid her in months. Janet is almost ready to quit when Reilly lands a seemingly ordinary case that brings him face-to-face with femme fatale / nightclub singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li ). It doesn’t surprise Reilly to learn that the situation involves local mob boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson) and his gaggle of dim-witted goons. But Reilly is shocked when his investigation leads him to superpowered people like Flint Marko (Jack Huston).

Very little of Spider-Noir feels anything like Marvel’s 2009 Spider-Man: Noir comics series, and its commonalities with Cage’s Spider-Verse character are few and far between. That might work if the show had a unique story to tell or if it was fully committed to being a straight drama. But Reilly’s arc is marked by many classic Spider-Man beats — get ready to hear about great power and great responsibility again — that have already been adapted multiple times before. And Spider-Noir frequently leans into a cheesy kind of humor that keeps it from living up to its name. 

Though Spider-Men from every universe tend to be wisecracking jokesters, there’s an intermittent cringiness to Cage’s outré performance here that highlights why this character (or at least a variant of him) works better as a cartoon character. From scene to scene, Cage plays Reilly as an aging quipster doing an iffy James Cagney impression, a smooth-talking Humphrey Bogart type, and a straight-up weirdo who lacks any sort of believable chemistry with romantic partners as they’re introduced. Cage’s Reilly is somewhat compelling when Spider-Noir calls for him to be a sullen, contemplative man pondering his place in the world. But those moments tend to be cut short as the show barrels through its too-predictable central story.

Cage’s Spider-Verse character worked because he brought an atonal energy to both films that complemented their focus on the multiverse. Things like Spider-Man Noir’s overwrought seriousness and inability to understand colors were funny because of the way they contrasted with the chaos and whimsy around him. But because Spider-Noir is so lacking in terms of emotional and thematic detail, Reilly comes across more like a messy pastiche of half-baked ideas as opposed to a fleshed-out character.

It’s a shame because the show is gorgeous and it’s clear that Cage is having fun with the role. But that’s not enough to make Spider-Noir a show that you need to see. Rather, the show feels like the result of Sony learning the wrong lessons from its previous wins. And it’s a reminder that we’re still a ways out from getting back to the good stuff.

Spider-Noir also stars Lamorne Morris, Abraham Popoola, Lukas Haas, Andrew Lewis Caldwell, and Jack Mikesell. All eight episodes premiere on MGM Plus on May 25th and on Amazon Prime beginning May 27th.

When The Mandalorian first debuted on Disney Plus, it was a refreshing reminder of how fascinating Star Wars stories can be when they aren’t focused on the same handful of well-established characters. Especially in its first season, the series felt like a sign that Disney was shifting gears after disappointing fans with its last trilogy of big budget features. But as The Mandalorian went on, it became overstuffed with supporting characters and haphazardly introduced lore that did little to make the show feel like must-see TV.

The relative weakness of The Mandalorian’s most recent season is part of what made it so surprising when Lucasfilm announced plans to bring the beskar-clad warrior and his infant ward to the big screen. It wasn’t clear whether The Mandalorian and Grogu was meant to be a straightforward extension of the series or a launchpad designed to elevate its titular characters to new levels of prominence within the franchise. And while there was little question about whether the film would make money at the box office, it seemed very possible that audiences might come away disappointed and unsure about Star Wars’ future.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is neither a knockout or a total disappointment. The movie is filled with excellent puppetry, and it cleverly inverts the show’s established Lone Wolf and Cub character dynamics. But between its by-the-numbers story and lackluster action sequences, The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a phoned-in film that would have been better off as a new season of The Mandalorian instead of a standalone project. 

Set shortly after the events of The Mandalorian’s third season, The Mandalorian and Grogu follows its titular duo as they settle into a new life of bounty hunting for the New Republic. Though the Galactic Empire has fallen, the galaxy is still crawling with Imperial outlaws who yearn for a return to power. They’re a constant threat to the fragile peace that the New Republic’s supporters have worked so hard to maintain. But as dangerous as these shadowy figures are, few of them are able to put up a fight whenever Din Djarin / The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu appear with their guns and training darts at the ready.

Because Mando and Grogu are so effective at dealing with Imperial war criminals, neither is all that concerned about their safety when New Republic commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) asks them to look into the disappearance of Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White). Ward is convinced that finding Rotta — Jabba the Hutt’s son — will convince his crime lord cousins to give up information about one of the New Republic’s most-wanted targets. And while the Mandalorian isn’t exactly jazzed about having to deal with the Hutts, Ward’s promise of a hefty bounty is more than enough to convince him to take the assignment.

Though The Mandalorian and Grogu references a handful of plot points from the Disney Plus series, it’s clear that writer / director Jon Favreau and his cowriters Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor crafted the film to be a self-contained story that you can follow without having seen any of the show. It’s a welcome change of pace for Star Wars given how lore-dense most of the franchise’s other recent films and streaming series have been. But The Mandalorian and Grogu also leans into a kind of narrative simplicity that keeps it from really capturing one’s imagination.

The way that characters frequently reiterate key details of The Mandalorian and Grogu’s story, like the fact that Rotta is Jabba’s son, makes it feel like Favreau and company don’t fully trust the audience to keep up with everything that’s happening on screen. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that this is a movie that’s pointedly aimed at young theatergoers who just want to see the baby Yoda bopping around while his taciturn dad wrecks ne’er-do-wells. But it also feels like a reflection of the way that streamers have seemingly become fixated on putting out projects designed for people who are only half paying attention.

That aspect of the movie wouldn’t be so annoying if things weren’t so straightforward, or if the Mandalorian was thrust into a few more imaginative battles. But as the film progresses, its stakes and sense of urgency never really build in a way that keeps you fully invested. Especially in its first half, The Mandalorian and Grogu plays like a serviceable but uncompelling collection of The Mandalorian episodes that would actually benefit from a little more action and punchy dialogue from returning faces like Zeb Orrelios (Steve Blum) and Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee). And it isn’t until Mando and his infant charge are split up around the halfway mark that the film locks in on a properly engaging dramatic energy.

While Mando’s narrative arc here is nothing to write home about, the movie does a surprisingly good job of making Grogu feel like a tiny person with autonomy and complicated feelings. This movie is a testament to how delightful Star Wars’ animatronic / puppet characters can be when they’re presented as the story’s centerpiece. But as delightful as the baby is, its cuteness is nowhere near enough to keep The Mandalorian and Grogu from feeling undercooked.

With a little more depth and intrigue, The Mandalorian and Grogu probably could have made for a solid season of television. But after years of struggling to get Star Wars films in theaters, Disney seems to be using this as an experiment in figuring out what kinds of movies viewers actually want to see. Instead, The Mandalorian and Grogu is a reminder of how much stronger these side stories can be when given a little more room to breathe.

The Mandalorian and Grogu also stars Martin Scorsese and Matthew Willig. The movie hits theaters on May 22nd.