Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill. Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: [email protected].
This edition: Why Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker‘s idea to deepfake cinemagoers into movies was typically prescient.
Charlie Brooker is the grandmaster of predicting how the human experience could be shaped by technology. Whether it’s Domhnall Gleeson’s replicant boyfriend pre-dating grief chatbots, creepy social credits systems, or killer robots, Black Mirror is often the dystopian nightmare we come to recognize in reality.
With that in mind, my ears pricked up when Brooker cheerily sketched out an AI vision to boost cinema ticket sales during an on-stage interview in 2025. He proposed scanning the faces of cinemagoers as they enter the theater and then using AI to cast them “randomly” in the actual movie. “So imagine if you went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark and you don’t know if you’re going to be Indiana Jones, or a melting Nazi,” he told the Edinburgh TV Festival.
This was August. Little more than a month later, OpenAI launched Sora 2, allowing users to insert themselves into infinite movie realms through its “Cameos” feature. The results went astoundingly viral. Brooker’s prescience had struck again.
The screenwriter touched on something fundamental about how AI content is being voraciously consumed as novelty. “It’s telling, isn’t it, that a lot of the AI-generated imagery you see is a remix of other things,” Brooker said.
But does it have the legs to walk into cinema theaters? The technology is there, but it’s fair to say that storytelling and audience expectations are not — and that’s before you even start considering the ethics for performers and privacy.
Attempts to revolutionize the cinema experience through innovation have flopped. Theaters flirted with choose-your-own-adventure-style ideas (something Brooker pulled off on Netflix with Bandersnatch), with little traction. 3D is now largely seen as a gimmick. And in 2013, the Dutch film APP allowed users to synchronize and expand the storyline via their phones, but it did not make the switch to Hollywood.
“People just don’t go to the cinema for this stuff,” says Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media at King’s College London. Julian Hanich, professor of film studies at the University of Groningen, is equally skeptical. “The pleasure of watching a film is partly based on self-extending into a different world,” he explains. “If you are already part of that world through AI, that’s kind of contradictory.”
It’s perhaps instructive that the two exhibition executives approached for this Rendering column did not wish to speak about deepfaking their audience members into works of art. And Brooker would likely be the first to acknowledge the pratfalls of such an endeavor.
But that’s not to say movie studios are dismissing these ideas. The best indication of this was Disney’s shock deal to hand over characters from titles like Frozen and Toy Story to Sora, with the best user-generated videos set to be hosted on Disney+.
It’s not quite Brooker’s cinema vision, but who would have predicted at the start of 2025 that Disney superfans could star in AI-generated videos on the Mouse House’s own streaming service? It would have sounded very Black Mirror.
