Indie film makes peace with AI
Sundance makes it official, Aronofsky makes it awkward. The normalization continues.
Hi everyone —
Hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
Making peace with AI was always going to be the way.
AI is just another tool in the storyteller’s toolkit. It’s amoral. Use whatever tool you need to tell your story.
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Enjoy today’s newsletter!
Shamir
CEO & Co-founder, Eddie AI
This week: Sundance normalizes AI for indies while Darren Aronofsky’s AI Revolutionary War series makes the case against itself, a YouTuber self-distributes a $17M box office hit that beat every Sundance film combined, YouTube kills background playback for non-Premium users ( 😓), and an Oscar-nominated cinematographer defends shooting Melania doc.
US Box office took a 12% hit from blizzard. 250 theaters across 30 states closed, pushing domestic grosses down to $59M. Theatrical is now brittle enough that even a bit of climate disruption alone can meaningfully dent national revenue.
Netflix commits €240,000/year to Blender’s Development Fund. The first major studio to back the open-source 3D tool at this scale.
SAG-AFTRA floats “Tilly tax” on AI actors. The union considers a royalty levy on studios using digital performers, with payments going into pension and health funds.
Film professors say their students can’t sit through films anymore. The Atlantic surveyed 20 professors who reported students failing basic film comprehension. At UW Madison, half a class picked wrong answers about Jules and Jim‘s ending. Some classes are now assigning film portions instead of full features. Dark times.
Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters was the most streamed film of 2025. logging 20.5 billion viewing minutes in the U.S., equivalent to 207 million full watches, with an Oscar-nominated song that topped Billboard for eight weeks. Streaming hits now brute-force cultural relevance without ever touching a theater.
Steph Curry won Sundance’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize. Curry co-directed with two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot. This is his second collaboration with Proudfoot after the Oscar-winning The Queen of Basketball.
Indie studios scramble as LA productions continue to lag. LA soundstage occupancy dropped to 63%, down from 90% during peak TV. Hackman Capital defaulted on its $1.1B Radford Studio Center mortgage and Goldman Sachs is taking control. Broker Carl Muhlstein warns “this could be the first of several foreclosures.”
YouTuber Markiplier just beat Sundance’s entire 2025 slate at the box office; his self-distributed video game adaptation Iron Lung earned over $17M this weekend across 3,000+ theaters, surpassing the combined US box office of every single Sundance feature film last year. Markiplier wrote, directed, and starred in the film without studio backing or traditional distribution.
Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dante Spinotti and David Fincher’s DP Jeff Cronenweth both shot the Melania documentary with Brett Ratner The $40M Amazon-financed doc about the First Lady was screened at the White House and grossed $7M opening weekend despite terrible reviews. Spinotti (Heat, L.A. Confidential) gave The New Yorker an interview where he compared lighting Melania’s face to being a “reporter.” No word from Cronenweth, but it’s fascinating watching cinematographers of this caliber sign onto what’s essentially a lavish vanity project. The money must have been good.
The vibe shift comes for Park City
We’re at an inflection point.
The prominence of AI at Sundance’s Story Forum, combined with Sundance Institute announcing an AI Literacy Initiative in partnership with Gotham, Film Independent, and Daniel Kwan’s Creators Coalition on AI, signals American indie filmmaking is ready to normalize AI.
At the festival, Adobe hosted a “Showtime! Park City: Gen AI Showcase” where filmmakers Taryn O’Neill and Momo Wang presented Adobe Firefly-generated shorts. O’Neill’s MythOS was completed in one month. Wang’s Wink took 28 days to produce five minutes of 3D animation , compared to two years for 10 minutes of traditional 2D animation on her 2023 Oscar-qualifying film PengLai.
As discovery platforms, film fests have always gained credibility by covering leading trends, especially new media. Why wouldn’t they? We’ve seen 360 at Cannes and VR at Venice.
But AI feels different.
These festivals can’t afford to ignore it anymore. Venice has a sidebar AI film festival. Runway already announced its 4th festival and a debut summit in March, headlined by former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Tech has more money than God and is spending like crazy. Google bankrolled the AI Literacy project and offered a $1M prize for an AI short film at the 1 Billion Follower Summit, receiving 3,500 entries globally.
Then there’s Darren Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup, which premiered On This Day... 1776, a short-form series recreating the American Revolution on TIME’s YouTube channel.
It does not look good.
The series uses gen-AI- with SAG-AFTRA voice actors. Pitched as a “hybrid approach” between humans and models. Yeah, no. Aronofsky’s involvement gave the project legitimacy it wouldn’t otherwise have, and Primordial Soup positions itself as an “ethical” AI studio but it just doesn’t work.
There was a lot of snark in the comments but one stood out for me.
Aronofsky’s efforts look no better than the AI slop flooding everyone’s feeds. If you’re going to use AI, at least do something different with it. We talked about Spike Jonze’s use in his Gucci film a few months ago. His AI worked because he used it to create the uncanny, something AI is inherently better at than realism.
Aronofsky shot for realism when he could do so much more.
Final Cut Pro 12 is here. They’ve added AI-powered search features and beat detection. Transcript Search finds spoken words in footage, Visual Search locates objects and actions, and Beat Detection syncs edits to music rhythm. It’s the second major version in a year after Apple maintained FCP X for over a decade. Eddie AI still integrates seamlessly, letting you drag FCP clips into Eddie to generate rough cuts via prompts, then export back with automatic relinking for polish.
You can no longer have YouTube running in the background. For years you couldn’t officially do this as a non-premium member anyway but many users have been using third-party browsers like Edge and Brave as workarounds.
A YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to GSMArena:
Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members. While some non-Premium users may have previously been able to access this through mobile web browsers in certain scenarios, we have updated the experience to ensure consistency across all our platforms.
In other words “We’ve seen your workarounds and we’re killing it.”
ACE Eddie Awards nominate Weapons, Wicked: For Good, and One Battle After Another for best editing. The American Cinema Editors announced nominees across 14 categories ahead of the February 27 ceremony. Drama contenders include Sinners and Hamnet, while comedy nominees feature Marty Supreme and Wake Up Dead Man. Filmmaker Ang Lee gets the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award.
Want to intern for A24? They’re hiring a post-prod intern in NYC for $18/hour. You’ll need Premiere Pro skills and prior experience, which feels cheeky, but at $18/hour it’s not offensive compared to the flood of film internships that go completely unpaid. Also, it’s A24.
This week we’re watching: Aronofsky’s AI YouTube series
Curious to hear people’s thoughts on this.
Retail Therapy
Alveos One is a chest-worn breathing wearable that monitors your breath in real-time tracking rhythm and variability to read your nervous system state, with haptic cues nudging you toward calm when stress spikes. Sounds useful on a film set, right?
The Spike Jonze comparison is key here. When Aronofsky's gen-AI attempts photorealism it just exposes the tech's weaknesses instead of leaning into what makes it distinct. I remember the first time I saw deepfake content that tried too hard to look "normal" and it had this unsettling flatness. Tools are neutral but execution choices matter alot, and going for realism with current AI models feels like using the wrong tool for teh job.