The meta-commentary is they consider the movie audience as part of the crowd.

/s

Anyone not expecting job roles, opportunities, or pathways to change in their career is going to have a very rough time, even more so than the hard time people from the last 50 years had.

There’s no guarantee of this happening whatsoever. We’ve already seen private companies gut internal training programs in favor of increased hiring of experienced people and this is only going to continue.

Economies have to provide work in order to facilitate consumption. If there are a handful of people making all of the money and gutting pay and job security to the core (i.e. improving efficiency), people are going to start rejecting the system wholesale and it’s not going to be pretty.

The French Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum, once people lost all hope of having a semblance of a decent standard of living, they didn’t just let rich keep on living, did they?

As a further point, by this logic the very machines and tasks of the Junior Developer role itself would never have been available. It follows societies are quite capable of A) finding new sources of work to be done B) having people do more than one course of work throughout their lives C) ensuring fair distribution of wealth by means other than enforcing artificial labor.

How do you expect actors to get a start if there's no where to start?

You might! Having extra credits at least indicates familiarity with the film environment. It suggests you can:

1) Arrive punctually.

2) Handle extensive downtime.

3) Repeatedly execute identical actions for many takes.

4) Take basic film direction instructions

and so on.

For smaller speaking roles (which are generally a prerequisite for larger speaking roles), where consistent delivery on strenuous and fast-paced sets might be far more crucial than pure acting talent, this background can be a beneficial indicator.

Disney can play with this stuff all they want, but society is going to start asking these big questions in louder and more forceful ways, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. You can’t take away an entire industry’s livelihood and expect them to accept it lying down.

NHL 2000. Those animations look exactly like the awkward crowds from NHL 2000.

All that money can now go directly to the studios, thank God.

It's not "much better quality" so much as "the quality is good enough that you concentrate on the generated content, and the generated content is more fun to watch than anything put out by Disney Star Wars lately".

Granted that's a low bar, but it's early days.

In fact, I think we're probably already seeing this... YouTube gets more viewing hours and more revenue than Hollywood.

It does indeed seem like a bad idea overall, especially given the current climate. I just don't have any reason to assume generative AI was involved.

And where would the NO FAKES Act draw the line? Would the studio be unable to create hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a battle? What if the soldiers were humanoid aliens or robots?

Write and produce good content and we'll watch, subscribe, and buy.

And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry? No one thinks of the real victims here /s.

I would love to see it all burn in the dumpster fire of its own making. It would be the ultimate in karmic self-correct. Too bad I don't really believe in that kind of stuff.

Phase I has already been initiated with Best Buy discontinuing sales of shiny round discs: https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-bl...

And IMO it is a mistake to use your own guesses as evidence supporting your guesses.

I can't remember the last time I rewatched anything...

The holy grail for them is a per-viewing fee whether that's ticket sales at a theater, or rental fees from a streamer. Allowing eternal multiple viewings is just leaving money on the table. If you think conversations about how to eliminate that have not occurred in a C-suite at any/all of the studios, you're just not thinking about it enough

Of course you would use CGI to create thousands of soldiers. But 5 extras in a gymnasium? That saved them what, $500?

The more unnecessary the use of CGI, the more distracting and offensive it is.

This is a cheap b movie, so they aren’t going to pay for the extras that a Cleopatra or big production would afford.

The fix for this seems to be better AI (a la Lord of the Rings 20 years ago) rather than employing more extras.

We've been using CGI for backgrounds for... Decades? And in a direct-to-tv disposable low-budget movie nonetheless.

We also have a whole genre of animated movies with no human actors which are of course bread and butter for Disney.

So while I feel there is outrage to be had, I also feel we are going waaaaaay over any reasonable line which will diminish the impact of our outrage. This seems like a silly distraction away from real systemic issues.

And although it’s Disney, these Disney channel movies have always been made on the cheap.

Nothing to see here folks.

We can surely do better CGI. But it might not be worth the cost here. To be clear, a background actor probably is worth the cost here because they are incredibly cheap.

AI could bridge this gap in both quality and cost though. Just need better tooling

this is not AI generated nor is it “capturing background actor likeness”. The guild needs to stop pushing this stupid argument. It’s not going to help anyone. Background actor likeness DOES NOT MATTER. It is not a valuable asset. This is digging their own grave. Those protections would not have avoided this at all.

It made me think deeply about the Moon landing conspiracy theory, and mankind's transition from mythos to logos.