Hannibal Lecter's first movie appearance was in 1986's Manhunter, starring Brian Cox. It took director and writer Michael Mann just five weeks to adapt Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon for the screen. But when it came to adapting his own work Heat 2, co-authored with Meg Gardiner as both a prequel and sequel to his 1995 film Heat Mann discovered the pain of self-editing.
And now we live in an era in which a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it is perhaps surprising that there hasn't been a huge shift in how film-makers approach this particular corner of sci-fi. Gareth Edwards' The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about AIs being the newly persecuted underclass as 1962's The Creation of the Humanoids, except that the former has an $80m VFX budget and robot monks while the latter has community-theatre production values.
A dusty visual overlay partially obscures crowds of men in the desert, sword-fighting in armor and on horseback. With some wardrobe tweaks, this scene could look like something out of Game of Thrones or Dune. But House of David showrunner Jon Erwin says he didn't have the budget to bring these scenes to life. Instead, he used AI.
The cost of acquiring [intellectual property], attaching talent, and producing quality content has surged due to the streaming wars, making it unaffordable for many.
What Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One lacked in narrative cohesion, it made up for by leaning into the reality that larger-than-life spectacle and Tom Cruise's enthusiasm for doing his own stunt work have always been the franchise's main draw.
