Sten Saluveer, Strategic Advisor and Head of the Cannes Next Innovation Summit, the Marché Du Film’s tech-focused think tank, made a startling prediction about the future relationship between Artificial Intelligence and film production during a presentation at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s International Industry Insights Forum on Monday.
“What we’re estimating is that in about a maximum of 5 years, we will be able to generate full-quality Multimodal, which means video, audio, text, and feature films,” Saluveer told the audience in Karlovy Vary. “So we are in a situation where, roughly, in about 5 years, perhaps at Karlovy Vary and elsewhere, you will see a fully automatically generated feature film.”
Saluveer: “This is the direction we are heading in.”
While AI tools have been used in the feature film post-production process for many years, there is no widely recognized narrative feature that has been produced using only AI tools. Turkish filmmaker Alkan Avcioglu has claimed his 2025 documentary feature, Post Truth, is the first documentary film to be produced entirely using AI tools. Filmmaker Hooroo Jackson has also claimed to have created the first fully AI-produced animated feature with the 2024 flick DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict.
Hollywood filmmakers have been embracing AI research to varying degrees. In March, Darren Aronofsky‘s AI-focused studio Primordial Soup announced a strategic partnership with Google’s DeepMind research lab to explore the role artificial intelligence coudl play in the filmmaking process. Last year, Avatar filmmaker James Cameron, widely considered one of the industry’s most tech-forward filmmakers, joined the board of directors of artificial intelligence (AI) firm StabilityAI. However, the Terminator filmmaker has routinely stated his skepticism about the technology’s potential to produce serviceable narrative works.
“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” Cameron told the Boz to the Future podcast in April.
“Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for Best Screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously.”
Karlovy Vary runs until July 12.
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