AI Is The Monster Under Our Bed

And eventually it's going to gobble us all up

I watched JENNIFER’S BODY with a sold-out crowd last night, and I’m happy to say the film still plays like gangbusters. There were plenty of laughs, screams, and a real energy pulsating throughout the theater during the screening. Pure magic, in other words.

It feels like just yesterday that I saw the film in an empty Sugar Land movie theater. It must have been early in the film’s release because based on box office data I looked up out of curiosity, the film did not play for many weeks at my neighborhood theater. It was in and out of the AMC First Colony quicker than it usually takes me to run through my inventory of clean socks.

I’m so glad this movie has found its audience since its initial release and continues to find new fans with each passing year. I saw my first taste of the film’s growing cult audience when, in 2015, I was lucky enough to host director Karyn Kusama for a screening of the movie at the Alamo Drafthouse Vintage Park. Kusama was treated like a rockstar by the small but dedicated audience that showed up. In the ten years that have followed, I’ve seen the audience grow at screenings as JENNIFER'S BODY spawned merchandise, national theatre re-releases, and a growing online fanbase that will defend the movie with their life.

Why did it take audiences so long to take to the film? While, sometimes, it just takes a while for people to realize what they’ve got, in the case of JENNIFER’S BODY, there was also the problem of expectation versus reality. The studio marketed the film to horny teenage boys, even though the film was written and directed by two outspoken feminists who wanted to make a movie that turned misogynistic horror tropes on their heads. There’s also the fact that Diablo Cody’s dialogue is super specific to her style. Speaking of misogyny, is it a coincidence that film bros will go apeshit for directors with trademark styles (Tarantino, Anderson (take your pick), De Palma, Spielberg), but Diablo Cody’s Cody-coded dialogue became a punchline for the first half of her career? I’ll never understand people’s aversion to stylish dialogue. You like watching superheroes and dragons and talking penguins, but the moment characters start speaking in witty, quote-worthy banter, that’s unrealistic? You're such a player-hater.

What does any of this have to do with AI? I’m glad you asked.

Everywhere I look, I see the approach of AI sneaking into the corners of our lives. Some of it’s innocuous - funny little pictures shared on social media. Some of it’s slightly less innocuous - authors being caught using AI to ape the style of other, more successful writers. What was first an annoyance has become an ever-present worry niggling in the back of my brain, like a song I’m having a hard time remembering the lyrics to. It’s the concern that AI will take not just my hobby (I check the listings every week at Comixology and the amount of AI comic books being sold grows every month), but also my job.

I’m a film programmer. Well, I’m mostly a film promoter. Anybody can pick what movie to show at a movie theater; getting people to come and watch that movie is slightly harder. But I digress. Over the weekend, I was talking with my wife, and I admitted my fear that, within the decade, most movie theaters will have replaced my role with some form of AI. I already know people in my profession who are building systems that can track successful rep screenings so that they can feed this data into a learning module and then generate a list of which classic films should be shown and when. It’s coming, fellow film programmers. And truthfully, these AI modules will probably do a pretty good job at programming movie theaters. There are about 100 films that, if you play them at a movie theater, will bring in an audience every time you show it. If you play those 100 films on repeat, you will probably have a successful movie rep theater on your hands.

But what happens to movies like JENNIFER’S BODY? I’m not saying that rep movie screenings are the secret behind JENNIFER’S BODY’s growing cult audience (heck, most movie theaters can’t even play the film due to Disney’s rep film licensing policies). That said, we certainly helped. Many of the cult films I love and cherish were the first I saw at a rep screening. Rep screenings not only give people a chance to rewatch the movies they already love, but they also provide them with a way to discover new movies.

AI is good at regurgitating data, but will it do a good job of introducing people to new favorites? My Netflix algorithm, which is still trying to get me to watch S.W.A.T. and SUITS, tells me that’s probably not the case.

I love my job, but I perpetually feel like I’m an endangered species living out my last days in the wild. This doesn’t feel like a sustainable job long-term, and not just because of A.I. Film programming is a young person’s game - it involves being clued in on what emerging audiences want to watch, and I’m 40 years old. Eventually, my tastes aren’t going to align with the youth. Whether or not AI takes over my job before I’m forced to find greener pastures is a question I’ll discover within the decade.

In the meantime, if only for the sake of the next generation of film programmers, I’ll keep fighting back against all forms of AI. Except for Spielberg’s AI. That movie is actually low-key kinda great. Have you considered revisiting it? Maybe at a screening at your local rep theater?