We’re told AI will democratize filmmaking, unleashing 500,000 new creators armed with tools to turn prompts into cinematic masterpieces. “Now anyone can make a movie!”
If only technical barriers were the problem to begin with.
Making a film is only half the battle. Without distribution, these movies won’t find audiences – they’ll vanish into the digital abyss known as “the long tail.”
In 2004, Wired’s, Chris Anderson, optimistically popularized the “long tail” market theory, arguing the internet would shift culture from blockbuster dominance to niche abundance.
Infinite digital shelf space, he claimed, would let every film, book, or song thrive.
The reality proved far crueler.
Take self-publishing. When Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing launched in 2007, it promised liberation from gatekeepers. Millions of wannabe authors flooded the new online ebook market – only to discover that the average self-published ebook sells fewer than 250 copies. So they downed their prices, to 99c to compete, then down to 25c. Then so many people gave them away for free that Amazon had to turn that into a special feature with ‘free week’ promotions.
Most writers found their entire readership consisted of their mom and a college friend.
It was the same story with Spotify, where 100,000 songs are uploaded daily and most go unheard. Or on YouTube, with its 5.1 billion videos, where the top 3 percent of channels get 90 percent of the traffic. Leaving 97% fighting over the remaining 10%.
The long tail doesn’t democratize success. It democratizes invisibility.
So what of the 500,000 new films we are promised?
Streaming services won’t buy and promote that mountain of content – because they need hits with guaranteed audiences, not algorithmic sludge.
Social media algorithms won’t prioritize them as they’ll drown each other in competition.
And audiences, overwhelmed by choice, won’t sift through the millions of hours of slop to find them. The result? For every ten generative AI projects that might break through, 499,990 will most likely languish unseen.
The real winners in all of this are the tech companies. Just as Amazon profits from millions of $1 Kindle books by writers who have failed to sell more than 250 copies – they’re still making 75c on 250 copies multiplied by millions of failed writers.
Likewise, wannabe filmmakers will pay for tools and generate content with no audience, but hey, the AI companies will get rich. 499,990 failed films is 499,990 subscription fees at $29.99 per month.
The long tail was never about empowerment. It was about monetizing hyped-up hope. So, it’s pretty unlikely we’ll be seeing a new golden age of filmmaking.
What we’d all benefit from remembering is the importance of historical realism.
This means understanding that the chances of something that’s worked for thousands of years being suddenly replaced by something just invented last week is terribly low. A new dating app might make meeting potential mates easier, but relationships, child rearing and perpetuating the human (the whole point of dating, ultimately) are still going to be as difficult as ever.
The reason there are relatively so few successful film directors is not because people don’t have enough access to cameras and lights, but because making successful films- AND getting people to pay money to see them in sufficient numbers – is really hard.
Historical realism teaches us the same old lesson that we learned in the Industrial Revolution and long before that. Making something that matters—really matters—is supposed to be hard.
That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
Because what the machines can’t do is precisely what makes us human. And that’s where the real work begins.
