Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we want to share with you one of the best conversations that happened during our big interview event in San Francisco last week. Our senior culture editor, Manisha Krishnan sat down with Jon Chu, the director of Wicked, to discuss what made the film franchise such a success. Even if you're not a fan of musicals, it's a fascinating conversation about the power of viral marketing and how forward-looking filmmakers like Chu are trying to navigate the AI era without compromising their creative vision and their execution.
The model for film-makers, who are the only people I really care about at the end of the day, is broken and it's not AI that's causing that, Proyas tells the Guardian. It's the industry, it's streaming. He says residuals that film-makers used to rely on between projects are drying up in the streaming era, and the budgets for projects becoming smaller.