Sanjay Gupta

So this is how it’s done.

Part 2. Because it makes no sense that the VFX industry is collapsing when these movies make billions. Here's how VFX contracts actually work. A studio sends out a description of what they need. It might say something as vague as "an alien spaceship appears." VFX houses then bid against each other to win the work. The lowest bid usually wins. One artist told io9 it's "a race to the bottom" where studios "undercut each other so much that by the time they finally get that contract, they've bid so low they're lucky to break even." Profit margins at VFX studios sit in the single digits. Then the director changes their mind. New shots get added. Old shots get scrapped and rebuilt. But the contract price stays the same. VFX houses eat the cost of revisions because if they push back too hard, they won't get hired for the next project. There are only about six major studios buying VFX work. Lose one client, and you could lose a third of your revenue overnight. Rhythm and Hues' three largest clients accounted for 97% of its total revenue. That's Rhythm and Hues, the studio that filed for bankruptcy in February 2013, two weeks before winning the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for Life of Pi. The VFX supervisor's acceptance speech got cut off by the Jaws theme 44 seconds in, right as he started talking about the studio going under. Life of Pi made $608 million on a $120 million budget. The studio that made the tiger look real got nothing. Fast forward 12 years. MPC, owned by Technicolor, gets shortlisted for a VFX Oscar for its work on Mufasa: The Lion King. weeks later, Technicolor collapses. 4,500 jobs gone. same pattern. The studios that make the magic happen can win the industry's highest award and still go bankrupt because the business model treats their work as a commodity to be bid down to the floor. Between 2003 and 2013, 21 VFX companies closed or filed for bankruptcy. Every other person on a film set, camera operators, hair and makeup, and set designers, has had union protection for decades. VFX artists didn't get to vote on unionization until 2023. They were the last major film craft without a seat at the table. The people who make movies look like movies had zero leverage to push back on any of this.

✨🇨🇳This is a high-speed charging station built by BYD in China. It can charge a car from 10% to 70% in just 5 minutes, and from 10% to 97% in 9 minutes, with a range of 1,000 kilometers.

BREAKING. Netflix to pay $600 MILLION for Ben Affleck’s secret AI company. InterPositive was founded in 2022 with a team of 16 people quietly building the most disruptive post-production tool the film industry has ever seen. Here’s what it actually does: it ingests your raw production dailies and builds a custom AI model trained specifically on YOUR film. Then it hands that model back to the filmmaker as the ultimate post-production weapon. Relight shots after filming. Remove stunt wires frame-perfectly. Reframe angles you missed on set. Enhance backgrounds. Add VFX. Fix continuity errors. All of it in days, not the months it currently takes. Every single one of those tasks costs studios millions of dollars today. InterPositive collapses that entire pipeline. Netflix already tested AI post-production on “El Eternauta” and reported 10x efficiency gains over traditional VFX. This Deal will change Hollywood forever.

AMAZON PRIME VIDEO BLOODBATH 2,847 employees got the email at 6:47 AM PST "Your role has been eliminated effective immediately" Badges dead by 7:15 AM. Slack access revoked mid-sentence Senior engineers who built the entire streaming infrastructure. Gone The team that shipped 40% faster last quarter using Claude for code generation. Eliminated 847 contractors in Bangalore just got handed their prompt libraries and deployment scripts Same streaming platform. Same feature velocity expected 14 remaining Seattle engineers to "manage AI-augmented offshore delivery" The kicker: those eliminated seniors spent 8 months documenting every architectural decision into internal wikis Every code pattern. Every debugging workflow. Every performance optimization trick That documentation just became training data for the AI systems replacing them VP of Engineering sent company-wide: "This transition represents our commitment to AI-first development" Severance packages include mandatory 90-day non-compete clauses Meanwhile the Bangalore team already pushed 12 commits using the extracted knowledge base One former L7 told me: "I literally trained the AI that made me redundant" If you're at FAANG and not seeing this coming you're already dead DMs open for anyone who needs to talk