Mackay Bell

Posted my first X article. It’s something I’ve been wanting to comment on for a while, but I waited until the new #GrokImagine refresh to finally address it. I have a long background in post-production and film tech, but I only started exploring AI generation a few months ago. I settled on Grok Imagine because it seemed like the cheapest way to test things out, and I was highly skeptical of AI. Very quickly, I was impressed, not just by Grok itself, but by the whole AI creation experience. I made an early decision to “stick with Grok.” In my experience, when competing software is changing this fast, it’s smarter to master one tool deeply rather than bounce between them. If a clear winner emerges later, you can always switch. Right now, that winner isn’t obvious. A bigger concern for me has been all the hype around the “thick wrapper” AI creative suites promising to help indie filmmakers disrupt Hollywood. I’ve heard these kinds of promises over and over during the digital revolution, the film festival boom, the social media revolution, and so on. They rarely pan out well for either the startups or the creators who buy into them. You can read my full article for my detailed business/tech take on where this sector is headed. So here’s my looser indy content creator opinion: CONTENT CREATORS BEWARE I don’t want to attack any specific companies, but if you read the article you’ll see that many of these exciting “AI creative suite” startups are designed to pull you in and then make it hard to leave. That’s basically what they have to do if they want to survive. Investors can throw money at dozens of them knowing only one or two will win. You, however, don’t get your time back if you pick the wrong one. If they provide a good service and you can afford it, great. The bigger risk is getting hooked on free credits, spending money you shouldn’t, and then realizing you’re locked in because all your assets and projects live inside their platform. Then they fold, get acquired, or change their terms to charge you even more. So heads-up: be careful about deep commitment while the market is still sorting itself out. Have an exit strategy. Back up your assets regularly. Test alternatives before you go all-in on big, complicated projects. AI creation is incredible, just be careful out there. CREATIVE STARTUPS BEWARE If you’ve read the article, you already know why I’m extremely skeptical about most of these companies’ long-term survival. That said, I genuinely hope some of you succeed. So I'll share a few hard truths in hopes you find ways to avoid potential pitfalls: You can’t effectively serve Hollywood, serious narrative/indie creators, and social-first creators at the same time. The needs are too different. You’ll have to pick one (or at most two) and go deep. • Focusing on Hollywood feels doomed in my opinion. The Ben Afflecks of the start up world will eventually take that market. • Narrative/indie creators need serious tools at reasonable prices. They can’t afford to be gouged, and they need long-term support. If they don’t succeed with their work, they won’t have money to keep paying you. • Social-first creators are the biggest market, but also the most likely to be swallowed by Google, Meta, YouTube, or the big labs’ own tools. In my view, the only realistic (though still difficult) path is to go all-in on indie narrative creators. That means thinking long-term, having a big runway, and accepting it probably won’t be a wildly lucrative market. There is one exception: the Pixar pivot. Instead of just selling tools, support great creators, find the best ones and back their talent. Then pivot to creating original IP. Study how Pixar started as a tool/company and evolved into a storytelling powerhouse. That might be the only way these startups can actually compete with both Big Tech and Hollywood. By becoming the kind of company the studios eventually have to buy for billions. Because the one thing the big studios and big tech companies still struggle with is consistently making great movies. That’s the real path to disrupting Hollywood. x.com/mackaybell/sta…

Pratt: Let's reduce regulations to make it cheaper to film in LA and rebuild homes for production crews! Access Media: PRATT IS LA TRUMP *Productions leave* Access Media: WHY IS HOLLYWOOD DYING!?

@AVARY A frighteningly accurate prediction of where Britain is heading right now.

But in what order will they play the episodes? We want information!

@cfryant @AVARY Same actor who got bored of the action show. Only agreed to continue if they let him do a new show and try something different. It's implied it's the same character, but not stated. (Possibly for legal reasons.)

@AVARY Is that a related series, or same people who made it?

@MatthewModine Great movie. You were great in it.

This is a great trailer for the 4K release of FULL METAL JACKET. It premiered 39 years ago #OnThisDay in Beverly Hills, CA. It was the longest production I’ve ever been involved with. While working with Kubrick in London, we found out my wife was pregnant, my son was born, and he turned 1 — all before the film was complete. If you’d like to support the @FMJDiary project and exhibition, you can bid on a signed set of Kubrick movies here: ebay.io/m/xAODig

@WriterMcG The poster looked like a show designed by agents. Let's give easy jobs to a bunch of older stars. Doesn't matter what it's about. Hey, what if we get the guys who did Stranger Things?

The predictable essence is what Hollywood always sells. And when you start looking at careers that way, the pattern becomes obvious. Jim Carrey isn’t really selling Ace Ventura, The Mask, or Bruce Almighty individually. The audience is buying elastic-faced Jim Carrey chaos. The particulars change. The core experience stays recognizable. Ben Stiller isn’t selling Zoolander, Dodgeball, or Tropic Thunder as completely unrelated products. The audience is buying a particular flavor of awkward absurdity, social discomfort, and comic escalation. M. Night Shyamalan isn’t selling individual premises. For years he was selling the feeling that reality is hiding something from you. The Duffer Brothers weren’t merely selling Stranger Things or The Boroughs. They were selling a specific experience: “Normal reality contains a hidden adjacent reality.” That’s the product. The monsters, children, laboratories, retirement communities, portals, towns, and settings are interchangeable pieces around the central experience. Hollywood is a reduction machine. A creator makes something complex. The audience loves it. Hollywood then asks: “What single thing did people actually buy?” Then it reduces the work down to that answer. Jim Carrey becomes “funny faces.” M. Night becomes “twists.” The Duffer Brothers become “secret worlds.” Then future projects are built around preserving that recognizable element. From a business perspective this makes perfect sense. Investors want familiarity. From an artistic perspective it can become a trap. A studio succeeds by making surprises predictable. Those goals coexist for a while. Then eventually they collide and a career comes to a screeching halt and power remains in the hands of bureaucrats with no imagination who forced this situation and guaranteed their own survival.

So I’m starting Odd Kid (@thisisoddkid) Odd Kid is a small IP studio for strange, emotional stories. The goal is to build original worlds with artists, filmmakers, designers, animators, musicians, and technologists. Use new tools when they help, old ones when they don’t. The goal isn’t to make more stuff faster but It’s to make the right weird things better. The focus is original IP. Films, series, shorts, experiments, and worlds that deserve to exist. We’ll also collaborate on the occasional project with studios, artists, and partners when it feels creatively right. But the ambition is simple: create and nurture original stories, and help bring them into the world. None of this would have happened without the support of Google and the people who opened the first doors: Thomas Iljic, Elias Roman, Josh Woodward, and everyone who believed there was something worth exploring here. Each new project led to another conversation, another room for collaboration/teaching/learning, another chance to meet streamers, studios, executives, producers, and artists I used to watch from very far away. It gave me a real foot in the door of an industry I’ve always loved, but never fully knew how to enter. For the time being, I'm going to juggle this between my role close to Google Flow, quality family time, and building up more meaningful relationships. We’re not trying to be the next Pixar Animation Studios because we’re busy figuring out how to be the first Odd Kid. More soon.

I’d like to stop you at art being human expression. Read Lord Von Balthasar on truth, goodness and beauty. Read CS Lewis on myth, Tolkien on fairy stories. Plato on the forms. Roger Scruton on Beauty. Art predates human expression so it can’t just be human expression. A beautiful stream in the woods you didn’t make is art but not human expression. Seek and you will find.

After yesterday's major Variety piece about the death of Hollywood, an anonymous Hollywood insider writes what Gene Maddaus and everyone else is afraid to. "Maddaus, being a mainstream journalist, rattles off all the acceptable explanations. California’s failure to compete with production incentives of other states. California’s harsh environmental and labor regulations. Even California’s bureaucratic incompetence. But of course he never mentions the real reason, which is the mentality behind all of these superficial causes. That Hollywood isn’t dying of old age or infirmity. But that it’s killing itself." Read full article just published here: mamathemagazine.com/the-inexplicab…

Higgsfield is using my videos for their "Unlimited Seedance Month" campaign on Instagram (without my permission of course) let me tell you I HATE this platform I never use Higgsfield I will never promote them DON'T USE HIGGSFIELD

@romanhelmetguy And an AI created South Park movie wouldn't create the same emotion at all?

Tech bros need to hear this: Nobody wants AI feature films. Imagine if Obsession was exactly the same, but all the actors were AI. It wouldn’t produce the same emotion at all. Art is human. I know we all hate Hollywood, but the solution isn’t AI. It’s funding a new Hollywood.

Though I must admit, the character consistency is improving.

Elon: Full movies by the end of this year. Mackay's Brain: Oh no! Everything I've been learning about how to edit and prompt Grok Imagine will be useless! I've wasted six months of my life. (Beat.) He can't be serious, the current software is no where near that capable. Yet he makes rockets and is a trillionaire. What do I know? (Beat.) Agent mode sounds super cool. Are they really getting close? (Beat.) Actually, it would be nice to just input a script and have a full movie created. Wow, that would be incredible! Elon's the best! (Tries out Grok Imagine's new agent mode beta.) Oh.

@CoordinatesDH @GoodBadFlicks Yes. Odds are a 25 million dollar film shot for 10 million instead would end up being much better.

@mackaybell @GoodBadFlicks The compression isn't about austerity. It's about removing the layers that exist to justify their own existence. The budget is the production's first piece of architecture, and most of it is load-bearing nothing.

Chasing Amy, Ben's first starring feature, was made for $250,000. It only opened in 21 theaters & it still made 12 million dollars. Roger Corman could have made 25 movies for 25 million Hollywood needs to admit it has a spending problem.

Full movies by the end of this year

@taherdhanera Yes. But also be prepared for someone to create something really sloppy and dumb, and for it to take off for some strange reason. Not advocating for sloppy and dumb, but what breaks through in popular culture is more complex than just "the good stuff."

Controversial Take: If you look at the current scenario in AI films, only a handful of sensible AI films have been made and are worth watching. I would say less than 1%. The rest are all social media hype and AI slop movies. Authentic storytelling is the real winner, and only a handful of people have achieved it. No matter how popular you are or how many millions of views you get, in the coming years only a handful of AI studios are going to survive because not everyone can produce great storytelling in AI cinema.

DAY 18 of Making a feature film with AI in 30 days. Today I have a new plan! And a new workflow to hopefully help me speed up. Follow my journey by subscribing to my channel on Youtube below.

@BegTheGhost Hollywood will try to co-op the best talent. And that's not always bad. But there are lots of examples of people who manage to retain ownership of their work. And long term that is certainly better for having freedom, and often better financially.

@mackaybell Great read. I’m with you on most of this. Maybe the first wave of AI films can make money because the space is still new, but once Hollywood smells money, it won’t stay easy. That’s why building an audience and owning the relationship with them feels like the real play.

So, the great and terrible thing about AI video is that I can now do anything I want. Every old script I couldn’t get made, every vague idea I dismissed as impossible to produce, I can now just do it. No gatekeeper can stop me. But there are still two hard realities: 1. It’s a lot of work to create anything great with AI. Maybe even more work than before, because there are so many possibilities that it’s harder to make something truly stand out. 2. How the heck do you monetize it? Having spent most of my life working on feature films, thinking about them, and studying their history, I can’t help but want to jump into making feature-length projects. It’s all possible now. Yet I’ve found myself less and less interested in watching feature films myself. I can’t help but wonder if that medium is basically over. With the saturation of short videos, rapid cuts, and constant social media endorphins, has my old brain been rewired to lack the patience for two hours of visual storytelling? And if mine has, what about all the younger people who grew up with it? Is there really a market for new feature films anymore, unless they come with $100 million in saturation advertising behind them? Pondering this, I decided to watch a bit of Seven Samurai, which I bought a decade ago from the Criterion Collection for my Apple TV. It’s three hours long, and although I’ve seen it many times before, I had no trouble focusing. It’s beautifully shot, but more than that, something interesting, and often unpredictable, happens every five minutes or so. I kept thinking how a modern Hollywood movie would have watered down or over-explained and dragged out every scene. When Mifune tearfully rescues the little baby from the fire (spoiler), he shouts, “This is me. This is exactly what happened to me.” It’s an incredibly powerful moment, and completely consistent with the other clues to his character. But the story simply moves on without any further explanation. You kind of want to know more, but it really isn’t necessary, you can fill in the blanks yourself. There is absolutely no way a Hollywood film today wouldn’t include a ten-minute flashback scene later, or recount the full backstory in a boring “rubber ducky” monologue. (The Oscars even did a sketch about Netflix demanding every plot point be re-explained every ten minutes.) So the answer, I believe, is no. The problem isn’t that no one has the patience for feature films anymore. It’s that too many of the ones Hollywood makes completely suck. Curious, I decided to see what Hollywood’s 1960s remake did with the story. I couldn’t remember if I’d already bought a copy on iTunes back in the day, so I searched for The Magnificent Seven on the Apple TV. It popped right up with a poster, so I assumed I owned it. But when I clicked, it took me to the Paramount+ app and demanded I sign in (I had canceled Paramount+). Then it wouldn’t let me go back, in fact, it wouldn’t allow any exit at all. I finally had to turn off the entire device. I searched again to find out how to buy it. This time it showed up in a different spot. I hit play, and the movie started. Great, I must already own it! I quickly discovered Hollywood turned the original into a more conventional but entertaining action buddy comedy. But just as I got into it: boom, a commercial. A commercial? I thought I owned it. Turns out Apple TV @AppleTV had quietly sent me to the Tubi app. Rather than sit through ads, I went back and tried to find a way to actually buy it. I couldn’t. I finally had to switch to my iPhone, dig through menus, and purchase it there. So what’s going on? Apple @Apple (probably pressured by the studios) is making it harder and harder to simply buy and own a film. They’d rather push you toward a paid streaming subscription or a free ad-supported version than let you pay $14.99 for permanent ownership. This perfectly illustrates the current entertainment industry mentality: subscriptions and advertising are the priority. Selling movies is discourged. They don’t want you to truly own them. It’s the “you will own nothing and be happy” philosophy in action. Back to AI filmmaking: I think there’s real opportunity here in the long run. If the industry keeps pushing the “own nothing” model, unwanted subscriptions, and ad interruptions, maybe the way to beat them is to sell films directly for ownership. Hollywood has already abandoned the DVD and Blu-ray market so thoroughly that rebel stores are popping up to serve fans who want physical copies. Classic movies are distributed by smaller companies. It’s not hard to set up a website where people can download and own the versions they purchase. Sure, everyone in indie space is debating YouTube monetization and hoping for a good AI movie streaming service. But maybe the real answer is paid downloads or physical media (DVDs, Blu-rays, USB drives, etc.). There is precedent for this. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008) was Joss Whedon’s independently produced web musical miniseries, created during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild strike. He self-funded it on a budget of around $200,000, released the episodes free online (where they went viral), then sold them via iTunes, DVD, soundtrack, and merch. It recouped costs quickly and ultimately generated over $3 million in total revenue. Whedon has said he personally made more money from Dr. Horrible than from writing and directing The Avengers (2012). People could watch it for free, yet many still bought copies later. After his 2017 cancellation, Louis C.K. rebuilt his career by selling stand-up specials directly on his website. His 2011 release (Live at the Beacon Theater) made over $550,000 in just four days and topped $1 million in twelve days at $5 each. His post-cancellation specials (Sincerely Louis C.K. in 2020 and Sorry in 2021) also generated millions in direct-to-fan revenue. Both creators already had large built-in audiences. New indie filmmakers will need to build one (perhaps starting on YouTube or other social media). That’s hard work. But selling directly to fans who want to own and rewatch your movie might be the home run, rather than chasing a Hollywood distribution deal. If you can do it once with your first film, you can likely do it again with the next. And your back catalog keeps earning even as new work gains popularity. Sell out to Hollywood, and they’ll own your work while you work for them. That may or may not work out long-term. Something for indie creators to think about. #IndieFilm, #AICinema, #AIFilmmaking

@DrDreams Thanks. I think it's important to have some discussion about where this could go long term. And to try to shape the direction so it isn't just shallowed by the existing entertainment industrial complex.

Great piece, Mackay. I agree and believe will be a massive, and profitable market, for both boutique and mainstream physical media releases of outstanding AI feature films and series. There will be theatrical distribution for AI films as well. There will be AI native IP that pops off with massive fandom that will support physical media and live theater experience.