Aug 8, 2023

Disney Establishes AI Task Force to Find Ways to Reduce Bloated Production Costs

The Walt Disney Company has established a task force dedicated to researching artificial intelligence and how to apply it across its many businesses, including production.

Task Force: According to a report published by Reuters, Disney created this group in hopes of developing artificial intelligence applications in-house and partnering with third-party startups. Currently, Disney is looking for 11 people with practical experience in AI and machine learning.

Why Disney is doing this - An anonymous source told the magazine that AI is seen as a potential resource within the Walt Disney Company to help curb soaring production costs. This person also said that Disney is not alone in working toward this end, and that legacy media organizations that do not embrace AI risk becoming obsolete themselves.

Disney's Super Expenses Disney's budget has ballooned in recent years, and every box office failure is a painful reminder. Last year, for example, Disney distributed two of the year's biggest box office failures, Strange Worlds and Lightyear. Together, both films lost an estimated $303 million at the box office. As we have noted in the past, for a company of Disney's size, individual flops are generally of little concern. However, over time a pattern forms, and when it becomes common for a film to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, it becomes a problem.

Nevertheless, other studios are finding ways to make big money on smaller budgets, and the idea that AI will be a panacea for Disney's overspending seems far-fetched. DreamWorks' "The Bad Guys" had a budget of $70-$80M and grossed $250M worldwide: The Last Wish made $481M on a $90-$110M budget. Illumination's "Super Mario Brothers Movie" earned about $100M on a similar budget and over $1.35B worldwide. And now, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," with a budget of $70M: Mutant Mayhem, is shaping up to be a huge success for Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies, having already earned $50M in its first week of release.

Where else will Disney use AI - According to Reuters sources, Disney wants to use AI in all of its operations, and jobs can be found in Disney's theme parks, engineering department, Imagineering, Disney-branded TV and advertising teams.

What is Disney's history with AI - In June, the company made waves when it revealed that AI image generation software was used in the opening credits of the Disney+/Marvel series Secret Invasion. The Disney Research website lists machine learning as one of the main research areas of the Zurich-based office. According to the site, machine learning is also used for "content generation." The page says:

We use a combination of probabilistic modeling and deep learning to find hidden structures in large data sets, from social media understanding, text mining, and consumer analytics to visual computing and content generation They work on algorithms for finding.

What they are saying - an unnamed executive who has worked with Disney told Reuters: 'Can we do something that will help us build robots that people can talk to in movies, games, or theme parks?'

Hao Li, former research leader at Industrial Light & Magic and co-founder and CEO of Pinscreen, said she worked with Disney on AI research dating back to 2006. 'They're basically researching anything based on human performance capture and creating digital faces. Some of these technologies will be adopted by Disney entities,' she told the publication."