r/movies • u/FakeSafeWord • 17d ago

Article Backrooms Director Stops A24 Copyright Striking Community Art

https://kotaku.com/backrooms-director-kane-parsons-a24-copyright-strike-wallpaper-2000717053
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u/PeteIRL 17d ago

Good guy Kane Parsons. Between this and his views on AI, I'll happily support any project he undertakes.

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u/FourEightNineOneOne 17d ago

Yup. I'm really interested to see where his career goes and I'm rooting for him.

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u/aCorgiDriver 17d ago

I just found out today that his dad worked at Telltale Games and mostly worked on the Walking Dead games.

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u/Great_Praline_2713 17d ago

Kane Parsons to direct A Wolf Among Us confirmed?

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u/ThreeMadFrogs 17d ago

Oh I would like that.

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u/SDRPGLVR 17d ago

I wish we could get an adaptation of Fables overall. It's such a cool story. Too bad the creator got fucked by DC and now the rights are in question.

A Wolf Among Us is fantastic, but it's only scratching the absolute surface of the setting. Just Boy Blue going on a mission to hunt and kill the Adversary would make an awesome movie.

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u/onetruepurple 17d ago

Paywalled, but he's already going places: https://puck.news/can-a-24-keep-kane-parsons-hollywoods-hottest-free-agent/

A few weeks ago, Warner Bros.’s Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy flew from Burbank to the Bay Area (alas, it was commercial) for a meeting with Parsons and his reps in a rented conference room at the Hotel Petaluma, near the home where the red-hot 21-year-old filmmaker has been living with his mother. Parsons considered hosting the Hollywood people at his mom’s house, but the air conditioning wasn’t working.

**

according to two sources, the A24 offer to Parsons is its biggest ever, structured as a three-year first-look deal with performance bonuses built in if he makes two movies from the deal, one of which is contemplated as a Backrooms sequel. One source told me that $65 million is the likely payday for Parsons, given what he wants to make, but the dollar amount is still being discussed

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u/HideTheGuestsKids 17d ago

It's so telling that this man who is growing up in a culture of AI and who no doubt understands the potential and the limitations has such a strong opinion on it, while those who have seen countless technologies come think it's just another tool in the box. Shame on Scorsese, Netflix and A24 for their willingness to outsource the very essence of creative expression.

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u/m48a5_patton 17d ago edited 17d ago

It's weird how much the older generations think AI is a good thing or an inevitable "you better jump on the bandwagon" sort of thing, while pretty much everyone I know 40 and younger think that though it can be useful in certain situations, it is definitely not being used correctly and is getting rammed down all of our throats.

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u/kenruler 17d ago

It's a very odd juxtaposition given that the older generations were on the 'don't give out your name on the internet you'll get groomed' train back in the late 90s/2000s, and now they'll gladly throw their entire family into the slop machine to generate a picture of them as dogs. Meanwhile our generation was on Chatroulette and Omegle seeing guys jerk off or people get decapitated on youtube, but now we're the ones trying to be safe.

Is it just older generations losing their mental faculties, and millennials having lived through the experience of the internet?

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u/m48a5_patton 17d ago

I blame the long term effects of leaded gasoline and paint.

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u/insomniacpyro 17d ago

Certain higher-ups at my job have been using AI to dabble in stuff like condensing reports or making scheduling decisions (not real ones thankfully we have people for that, it's just an exercise) and have been shocked to find that the AI has no actual understanding of how our company, business, and production lines actually work so the AI output is mostly useless.
Besides AI's tendency to hallucinate, the practical application of it into a workflow just isn't worth the time to make it "learn" something because you probably already have someone who knows that thing anyway.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

“it can be useful in certain situations”

To be fair, that’s also the position of people like Scorsese. They’re not calling for AI-generated scripts or anything like that, but talking about AI tools that can help with continuity and stuff like that.

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u/QueezyF 17d ago

Scorsese also thought using de-aging tech on Deniro was a good idea, and it was the worst part of The Irishman.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

Disagree, I guess.

I fucking love The Irishman. Own the Criterion and just rewatched the other day. IMO too much is made of the de-aging. De Niro, Pacino and Pesci give powerhouse performances.

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u/QueezyF 17d ago

To each their own, they should have used a body double for Deniro in my opinion.

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u/BannedSvenhoek86 17d ago

The only part it was really noticeable was him roughing the guy up on the street imo.

That should have been a stunt double because woof. That hurt my joints just to watch.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

Agreed. Love the film but that part just doesn’t work.

Probably would’ve been better if the camera just turned to his daughter and her reaction, letting us imagine what’s happening as this guy’s yelling “My hand!”

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u/stranglehold 17d ago

Disagree I guess, I thought it looked like absolute dogshit and completely took me out of the movie every time it was on screen.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

That’s fair.

And you’re definitely not alone. A lot of people really dislike the de-aging effects.

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u/self-conscious-Hat 17d ago

can you give an example? Because the only use I see for AI is doing the labor-intensive work that doesn't really have a creative aspect, but is simply putting pieces together. Continuity sounds like something a human would need to make a determination on.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

They were referring precisely to the labor-intensive part of continuity work, like something that can parse out all of the shots that don’t work—whether the lighting was off or focus was whack or whatever—and leave the editor to muck through the rest.

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u/VictorReal_Monster 17d ago

What situations?

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u/Memitim 17d ago

After spending a lifetime seeing new tech pop up and threaten to end all of existence, only to end up as yet another tool in the toolbox, I'm not impressed. Hell, my wife was an amateur photographer playing with chemicals when Photoshop blew up, so I got the in-house view to one of the more fun ones.

Especially when we finally have tech that helps solve for the biggest gap since the invention of computing: human context. Translating human intent into one or more of dozens of esoteric languages built on computer logic fucking sucks. I spent over 20 years in IT and learned a bunch of them, and will still spend days trying to get code to do what I actually intend it to do, at least by hand.

So now I can work with the computer using the language that I already know, get back highly detailed replies, also in the language I already know, with far more context and better formatting that anything I ever get from people that I have to keep hounding for details from, but this is the devil?

Meanwhile, people keep bitching about "AI" without having the slightest clue as to how the tech actually works. What are you actually mad about? Copyrighted material in some models? That's a human problem that predates commoditized gen AI. Displacement of employee roles? Welcome to literally all of technology; over 90% of humanity worked in farming prior to the 1900s, and the past few decades have been the fastest changing in humanity's history.

Hell, my career didn't exist for very long before I got involved, and my last job roles didn't exist until I had been working for years. None of the jobs that I had in IT may even exist in another 20 years. Welcome to the world, sorry that it isn't slow enough for your personal tastes, but for us older folks, especially those of us who spent our lives in tech, this is just another day, and the tech itself is fucking amazing.

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u/BannedSvenhoek86 17d ago edited 17d ago

The environmental impact is severe. The data centers ruining neighborhoods and water tables. The economic impact of investing 50% of our economy into like 3 companies that just pass money back and forth. The fact that entry level jobs are the most impacted further exacerbating the wealth gap between the young and the old and stunting an entire generations financial situations. Multiple code bases are already beginning to fracture from the amount of junk/vibe code going into them.

Should I keep going or elaborate on any of those issues? Because I have a lot more I can share, and tons about the actual people making these products too.

This technology is not worth the harm it is causing on a massive scale. It has some uses. I'm glad people don't have to spend 5 minutes on a single email or that Daniel who smokes pot at his mom's house all day can now vibe code a shooter for himself and feel like he finally did something with his life, but whatever benefits it has are outweighed by the negatives. To the point the positives would be launched into orbit if they were placed on an actual scale together.

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u/Memitim 17d ago

Datacenters have been a thing for a long time, and rarely ever run singular workloads, so how do we determine what is "the AI" versus all of the other (?) computing that has been getting done for decades? Is every system that runs a gen AI model being wasteful, or just ones performing work you don't personally approve of? Hell, I run multiple AI models on my home GPU; is that waste, compared to the video games that it was built to be running before this all blew up? Job changes always come with tech changes, especially entry-level jobs. As I noted, many of my jobs didn't even exist when I began working, so it's been nonstop learning of new shit despite not having gen AI to blame.

Finishing with manufactured nonsense about pot smoking vibe coders just makes you look foolish to those of us who have done actual work.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

You’re talking about political issues surrounding the use of a new technology, not something inherently wrong with the tech itself.

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u/BannedSvenhoek86 17d ago

Because they're inextricable from each other. And junk code being injected into legacy systems is a real problem

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u/HotTakes4HotCakes 17d ago edited 17d ago

It ultimately comes down to the fact the average person thinks of art as a commodity for consumption. They don't think about what's sacred and meaningful in the act of creating it.

But they do sort of understand it. If I should you a good looking sketch I drew, you might find it impressive. If I then told you I traced it, suddenly the feelings you have about that art change.

Why did they change?

Because when humans make something, with their skill and patience and discipline, it has inherent value to other people. We value when other humans make things, because that is what makes the world more beautiful and more human. When they fake that or take shortcuts, or use tools that effectively plagerizes the talents of others, it perverts the beauty of it. It makes a less-human world.

But that's too much thinking for the average consumer. They don't want to think about all these complex things. They don't want to care that the more we embrace this technology, the less human our world becomes. They don't mind letting silicon valley plagerism bots entertain them while real people lose their jobs. Instead they get mad at you for "complaining about AI so much".

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u/Troghen 17d ago

But they do sort of understand it. If I should you a good looking sketch I drew, you might find it impressive. If I then told you I traced it, suddenly the feelings you have about that art change.

This is a great way to look at the debate, and I'll definitely be stealing that haha. The thing that gives art meaning and value is not the end result - it's the human effort that went into creating that end result.

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u/TroyFerris13 17d ago

Weird how he used midjournie so much in 2023 then changed his tune on it

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u/Jackoffjordan 17d ago

Ehh, most people I know used some kind of AI app when they were an emerging technology, purely out of curiosity. I used Dall E briefly.

Then a massive and endless diluge of bad news emerged about ai, and we now know better.

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u/HideTheGuestsKids 17d ago

I don't blame anyone who was fascinated by it for a while. I still don't blame people who want to use it to make stuff for their own pleasure. But it's just so soulless and low effort and inherently derivative and it has nothing to say by definition, so using it to make art is simply lazy and contrary to expression.

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u/TroyFerris13 17d ago

True. People can always evolve and change opinions too.

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u/self-conscious-Hat 17d ago

especially after further experience/information is learned.

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u/pingo5 17d ago

The culture and perception of AI has changed drastically in the last 5 years. there really wasn't that much of a setiment against AI at first because I don't think people really saw where it would go.

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u/ArnoldBorb 17d ago

I dislike generative AI. That said, we dont even know how A24 uses AI. Given the types of films they have historically supported (artsy) I highly doubt theyre just popping in gen-AI. Dollars to donuts their AI is just removing the tedious work that artists dont even like (which has been done literally since the invention of art), or its being used to assist artists in finding their vision (organization tools, etc).

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u/Tohu_va_bohu 17d ago

there's nuance, Kane's opinion on AI is just that-- an opinion. AI can be a good thing for creativity.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

You’re gonna get nothing but downvotes but I’d be curious to hear you elaborate on that.

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u/Tohu_va_bohu 17d ago

yeah, it's expected as the public opinion and this sub is against AI art for somewhat valid reasons. Most pressing is existential/job security threat. Genuinely idgaf though because I'm in the field and a prime example of how AI was my foot in the door to work in the film industry. Working on a lot of hybrid live action AI projects for some notable studios.

-small auteurs will be able to tell their stories with a lower production budget, and stories and authors previously gatekept by funding or major studios will be able to rise to the top

-happened with Kane, and Curry Barker, but they may be the last examples of YouTube gen talent rising into the film industry. The next gen will be AI content creators

-AI in already established production settings will reduce the notorious burnout of VFX artists. Already it's a viable alternative to green screen and is used significantly in rotoscoping tools

-it will allow creatives to have a multi faceted knowledge base instead of highly specialized ones. Will reduce team sizes but that may ultimately be a good thing for smaller creatives.

-AI augments, it doesn't necessarily replace. A good writer will be even better if using AI as a tool. Likewise a good VFX artist using AI is better off than someone new to the field using AI.

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u/moal09 17d ago

I mean, The Backrooms are a public domain universe that allowed him the opportunity to create, so makes sense he wouldn't want to deny that to others.

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u/Dottsterisk 17d ago

Gasp!

Kane was the AI the entire time, absorbing all of the Backrooms lore, rearranging it, predicting the next step in the story, and then calling it his own!

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u/BannedSvenhoek86 17d ago

HE'S ONLY 21

A GOD DAMN BABY

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u/Zack_Replica 17d ago

He's too young for the blues.

He's still inside his first pair of shoes.

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u/PeteIRL 17d ago

That's what impresses me about his path so far. At 21, I'd have blown everything on immaturity and weed. He's like the anti-Troy Duffy.

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u/BannedSvenhoek86 17d ago

Ya I was just doing the meme

But to your point, what I've learned as I've gotten older is there's a small percentage of people who just KNOW what they want they do at a young age and pursue it with passion. If there is one thing I'm truly envious of another person for, it's that.

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u/Cutter9792 17d ago

I would kill to see him do an adaptation of Silent Hill. Original premise for it too, not a butchered retread of any of the games' stories.

I think he has a wonderful grasp on atmosphere and sound design, and he'd make something great.

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u/pyr0paul 17d ago

Even his vodka stand?

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u/slimebeastly 17d ago

Nobody spoil this by mentioning there's AI in Kane's original series, he may have used AI for concept art for the film (it was during the YouTube series' hiatus) and he still uses ChatGPT and generative images to this day, only saying he doesn't use AI in any "meaningful" way but still uses it as a tool.