Sora Burns $15 Million on Video (each day); Nolan Burns 2 Million Feet on Film
Villeneuve wraps his dune, Nolan burns two million feet of film, and DJ streamlines their Neo.
Happy Monday. It’s gonna be a wonderful week. You got this.
On one side, Christopher Nolan went out on the open sea, burning two million feet of film to drag The Odyssey into IMAX reality. On the other, OpenAI is lighting $15 million a day on fire so the internet can generate ten-second meme videos with perfect motion blur.
Villeneuve quietly locks Dune: Part Three.
Roger Deakins shrugs at AI with the indifference of a man who’s seen every tool come and go.
The BBC, meanwhile, is one editing mistake away from a constitutional crisis.
And Timur Bekmambetov claims he can teach machines how to “act”, method prompts and all.
Brands are wobbling too.
Coca-Cola’s holiday ad leans so hard into AI that its trucks forget how axles work.
Gear companies keep shipping toys for creators who still shoot in the real world.
And Vince Gilligan reminds everyone that storytelling, not software, is the thing that survives.
A week of cinema, somehow, caught in between the ocean and the cloud. Let’s go.
Render Reel
Oscars Reinstate “Honor System” After Academy Email Leak NBC reports voters are again trusted to watch films without verification, raising questions about awards legitimacy.
Dune: Part Three Wraps; Villeneuve’s saga locks picture; spin-off expands the timeline instead of waiting for Part Four.
Roger Deakins on AI: “Use Whatever You Want” The cinematography icon shrugs at the tech and doubles down on narrative over tools.
One Editing Mistake Could Cost the BBC Its Charter: a single miscut in a Trump Panorama triggers a political firestorm and regulatory scrutiny.
OpenAI’s $15 Million-a-Day Habit
OpenAI is torching something like a quarter of its revenue just to keep Sora’s video hose spraying. For a company already losing money at a relentless pace, OpenAI is leaning into the chaos with reckless abandon.
A half-trillion-dollar valuation, a $20B annual revenue run rate… and a fat $12B quarterly loss lurking behind the curtain.
Then came Sora for iOS. One million downloads in a week, four million by Halloween, and an endless stream of AI “videos” flooding group chats.
Forbes’ estimates the cost of each 10-second generation at around $1.30. That might not sound brutal, until you scale it.
Assume Sora’s ~4.5M users, 25% of them churning out about 10 clips a day. You end up at 11.3M videos every 24 hours. Multiply that by $1.30 each and you’re staring at roughly:
$15M per day
Or
$5.4B per year
…all to generate videos that are overwhelmingly memes.
Even OpenAI’s own team isn’t pretending this is sustainable. Bill Peebles, the guy running Sora, literally said the economics “are completely unsustainable.” And he wasn’t exaggerating.
Video models are orders of magnitude pricier than text with four-dimensional data, coherence over time, huge inference loads and GPU minutes piling up like parking tickets.
And yet OpenAI keeps the free faucet open. Why?
Because this is the land-grab phase. Build the user base now, survive the burn, figure out the monetization later. It’s the oldest internet play in the book except the compute bill has never been this astronomical.
Analysts argue the cost curve will crash downward soon: video inference 5x cheaper next year, maybe another 3x drop after that. And once OpenAI flips the switch on pricing with ads, pro users in film/advertising and enterprise licensing then Sora could turn from a loss machine into a serious revenue engine.
But even Sam Altman is admitting a limit.
Is the free era of Sora is living on borrowed time?
OWC Launches StudioStack A Modular, Stackable Storage Tower for Mac Creators aimed at pro editors.
Desview Announces Atlas-X Wireless Video System: low-latency, budget-friendly monitoring system targeting indie sets.
DJI Neo 2 Lands With Smarter Tracking and Better Low-Light Performance DJI pushes further into creator-friendly, pocketable cameras.
The Director Who Wants to Teach AI to “Act”
Bekmambetov, the Wanted director and long-time screen-life evangelist, has spent $5 million and a decade building Stanislavsky AI, a new system designed to aid AI actor performance.
Unlike the usual “describe the emotion” prompting, Stanislavsky tries to reason its way into a performance.
Tell it “he’s sad” and you get mannequin energy. Tell it “his dog died yesterday and the sunset reminds him of it,” and suddenly the model understands the nuance.
At least, that’s the pitch.
Bekmambetov is really trying to rebuild the entire production pipeline. Feed a script into the system and it starts proposing shots, sequences, production design cues, even a shared interface where departments can collaborate and steer the AI.
It’s pre-vis, storyboarding, blocking, and departmental coordination collapsed into one software brain, and it launches in December.
He used it on his next film, Mercy, a Chris Pratt thriller about a man pleading for his life with an AI judge. Before shooting a single frame, he showed Amazon MGM a fully AI-mocked cut of the movie. This meant that a studio could feasibly “see” a film before the crew even arrived on set.
His next project goes further: The Man With a Shattered World, mostly unfolding inside a soldier’s fractured mind, and will be almost entirely AI-generated.
One human actor. Everything else synthetic.
But despite all this, he’s not predicting the extinction of actors. The future he imagines is hybrid, performers training their own AI doubles, directors blocking scenes with machine stand-ins, and production using synthetic mockups to move faster and cheaper.
AI won’t kill creativity, he argues. Bad storytelling will. And whether Hollywood likes it or not, Stanislavsky is about to force that conversation.
Nolan’s 2 million feet Odyssey
Christopher Nolan’s 13th feature scales up again with reports of the production using up to two million feet of film during a 91-day shoot. With months spent filming on open water with Damon and the crew actually battling real waves. Nolan wanted audiences to feel the danger and disorientation of voyaging through an unmapped world.
This is Nolan’s philosophy at its purest: the physical world pushing back at the filmmaker. If Oppenheimer was about the terror humanity created, The Odyssey is about the terror humanity sailed into.
As modern Hollywood races toward synthetic production, virtual stages, and AI-assisted everything Nolan is choosing to double down on the opposite. The kind of cinema that can only exist through sweat, danger, and film stock by the mile.
Digital Domain Names Sudhir Reddy as New President THR notes a leadership shake-up at one of VFX’s legacy powerhouses as the industry repositions around AI and real-time tools.
Vince Gilligan Says AI Won’t Ruin Storytelling the Breaking Bad creator shrugs off tech panic and puts the blame back on craft.
Cut of the Week: Coca-Cola -Holidays Are Coming
Every December, Coca-Cola rolls out its most dependable myth: the red holiday truck drifting through snow like a corporate sleigh.
Lately, though, the gloss has slipped.
This year’s spot carries the telltale quirks of AI. The weightless movement, the soft, syrupy glide, the way shots feel like they were born in isolation and stitched together after the fact.
But here’s the real question: if Coke didn’t label it “AI-made,” how many viewers would actually clock the difference? Most people watch these ads while scrolling, half-distracted, letting the imagery wash over them. A floating axle or an impossible shadow barely registers when the brain is just hunting for holiday vibes.
Or maybe audiences are now “AI-literate” enough to feel the uncanny valley the second they step into it.
The “making of” only deepens the oddness.
Coke says it generated over 70,000 clips to reach the final cut. They even bragged about needing just five “AI specialists” and a month of work, though the full campaign still touched nearly 100 people by the Wall Street Journal’s count.
Maybe the issue isn’t the tech. Models like Sora 2 and Veo 3 clearly improved this year. But even cutting-edge AI starts to wobble when asked to deliver an entire commercial instead of a single, polished hero shot.
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