{"id":1986,"date":"2026-06-12T15:37:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=1986"},"modified":"2026-06-12T15:37:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:37:54","slug":"ron-howard-thinks-audiences-will-decide-whether-ai-films-succeed-what-are-we-invested-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=1986","title":{"rendered":"Ron Howard Thinks Audiences Will Decide Whether AI Films Succeed: \u2018What Are We Invested In?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nRon Howard believes there\u2019s a chance AI-generated films could succeed \u2014\u00a0but only if movie audiences decide they\u2019re worth watching.<\/p>\n

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\n\tHoward spoke during a fireside chat at the Runway AI Festival, the AI company\u2019s content showcase, at New York\u2019s Alice Tully Hall on Thursday evening. The Oscar-winning director of \u201cA Beautiful Mind\u201d\u00a0and \u201cFrost\/Nixon\u201d acknowledged to Runway co-CEO Crist\u00f3bal Valenzuela that the technology has been \u201cdemocratizing\u201d\u00a0the filmmaking process, allowing storytellers to \u201cmore efficiently, more broadly\u201d\u00a0tell their stories. But whether those films end up dominating multiplexes will depend on whether audiences have an appetite for them, he said.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s going to be, again, up to the audiences to determine what appeals, what resonates,\u201d\u00a0Howard said before the crowd of several hundred attendees, acknowledging that creators will have choices between traditional and AI-facilitated production methods.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s going to ultimately be determined by us. What\u2019s worth our time? What are we invested in? What values do we care about?\u201d Howard continued. \u201cDo we care about knowing the alive actors on screen and connecting with them for that reason, or which I think won\u2019t ever go away, but are we also fully willing to invest in characters that are synthetic? There are already CGI characters, there are already animated characters. So, I think the answer is, we don\u2019t really know, but I expect there\u2019s room for all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHoward also said he shared the concerns about the changes AI has inflicted upon the creative community, which has splintered both auteurs and actors alike. But it was up to the same creative community to figure out the best legal and cultural guidelines about how AI is used.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s all our job to worry about it, think about it, experiment with it, learn from it, and talk to each other and work on it,\u201d\u00a0he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s going to evolve, and audiences are ultimately going to tell us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tHoward\u2019s comments come as top-tier directors have taken varying positions on the technology in recent months. Martin Scorsese said last week he had joined the German AI startup Black Forest Labs as an adviser, saying the technology could help make the storyboarding process more efficient, while Steven Soderbergh has repeatedly heralded his use of generative AI in films such as \u201cJohn Lennon: The Last Interview\u201d\u00a0and an upcoming Spanish-American War film. Meanwhile, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan have said AI should be a limited \u201ctool\u201d\u00a0as part of the broader filmmaking process, with Spielberg saying on a podcast last month that AI would not be \u201cthe final word\u201d in his films.<\/p>\n

\n\tHoward said that some of the purported ways AI could optimize the filmmaking process \u2014\u00a0such as generating images quickly, lowering costs, quicker turnaround in editing \u2014\u00a0haven\u2019t yet emerged for him despite the \u201cbreakthroughs\u201d\u00a0in the technology.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt seemed it\u2019s going to create a lot of efficiencies, but so far I can\u2019t say that I\u2019ve seen it yet in my world,\u201d\u00a0he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tValenzuela, Runway\u2019s co-CEO, has spoken repeatedly about the company\u2019s tools opening up the world of filmmaking to a broader audience. In a press conference with reporters before the Howard chat, Valenzuela said he believes that soon much of the content floating online will be AI-generated by users, though he disputed whether that would quell content made through traditional filmmaking. \u201cIdon\u2019t think that you take the human out of the generation part,\u201d\u00a0he said. \u201cThe human is the one generating the content in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is not a zero-sum game,\u201d\u00a0he said. \u201cYou\u2019re free to choose what medium you want to do, so if you want to have a voice of a person and do, instead of traditional CGI, a much more effective AI workflow, you can. If you want to do all traditional filmmaking, you can. There\u2019s nothing preventing people from choosing things. I think that\u2019s sort of a mutual discussion, because I think a lot of the topics sometimes are skewed towards this idea that we\u2019re going to stop doing everything we\u2019ve done, and everything in the world now moving on will be AI-generated and kind of nothing else, and I think that what we just see right now, that\u2019s not what\u2019s actually is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ron Howard, speaking at the Runway AI Festival, said there’s a chance AI-generated films could succeed \u2014\u00a0if movie audiences decide they want to see them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1705,1706],"class_list":["post-1986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-ron-howard","tag-runway-ai"],"yoast_head":"\nRon Howard Thinks Audiences Will Decide Whether AI Films Succeed: \u2018What Are We Invested In?\u2019 - Relocation Observer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=1986\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ron Howard Thinks Audiences Will Decide Whether AI Films Succeed: \u2018What Are We Invested In?\u2019 - 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