AI is already starting to affect how filmmakers are pitching movies. That’s what Jon Flynn, the executive vice president and head of FoxNXT for Fox Entertainment, revealed during TheWrap and What’s Trending’s first-ever AI Creator Day.
Launched in April, FoxNXT is Fox’s internal AI and next-gen technology studio that’s dedicated to building digital media tools. Before leading FoxNXT, Flynn was the head of AI go-to-market strategy for media at Google. During Tuesday’s event at UCLA’s Ralph Freud Playhouse, Flynn revealed that a creative came to Fox Entertainment to pitch a movie but noted that, due to their AI-focused and budget-conscious approach, radically changed how they dealt with the studio.
“I’ve never seen anybody do this. They did five different meetings, all in one feature meeting,” Flynn said during the “Rewriting the Studio Model: Upskilling Talent for an AI-Powered Future,” which was moderated by TheWrap’s Managing Editor for Business and PRO, Roger Cheng. “They said, ‘This is the typical budget for what we want to make our feature, but we want to use these [AI] tools, which we think is going to rationalize about 15% of the budget, which we would like to put back in because we do want to go to these two locations … We think we found a way not to break that budget that we’re putting in front of you as a proposal.’”
Flynn noted that this one meeting with an unnamed creative wasn’t a one-off experience. He’s seen filmmakers going into pitch meetings being more conscious of how AI tools can be used to stretch budgets. This can include everything from adding an explosion into a show — a common effect that can be costly — to using AI to recreate multiple speculative angles from the tragic car crash that led to Princess Diana’s death, an approach that was used during the TMZ special “Celebrity Crime Scene: Princess Diana.”
“If you have a big piece of content that’s on Fox, you’re going to be like, ‘Oh shit, that show is amazing! That was great! How the hell do we do that for that budget?’” Flynn said. “That’s us being very diligent with the tools that we’re using to put more money back into the screen, so it looks bigger.”
Flynn echoed a common framing of AI, that the technology’s ability to reduce the cost and time on projects will result in more ambitious projects, rather than simply job cuts and humans getting displaced.
Repeatedly during the panel, Flynn emphasized that the savings AI provide doesn’t necessarily translate to cost savings. It also translates into time saved, which can be spent either bettering a project or working on a new one.
“Say, for example, you save 20% aggregated across and you’re shooting a series with six episodes,” Flynn said. “You spend the same amount of budget for five, and you get six episodes. What does that allow us to do? It allows us to put that back into the system so that we can go and create more content, and we create content that is going to be relevant to distribution and the needs of our audiences.”
Flynn confirmed that 20% in average cost savings in a benchmark is organization shoots for.
But to make the most of those cost savings, Flynn emphasized the importance of AI education within Hollywood. “I think we have a big responsibility to this industry as a whole to train people on how to use the tools that we in the studio system use,” he said. “We can teach you those tools, but I cannot teach you 20 years of industry experience. I cannot teach you the art that you have inside your head and the stories that you have inside your soul. We can’t teach those, right? But we can teach you ways to get those out into a manner which will allow more of those stories to be told.”
The FoxNXT platform isn’t the only way that Fox Entertainment has embraced AI. The media company has also used the technology in its vertical videos, video editing and in its advertising media platform. The company also has key AI partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
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