Can Hollywood, which once resisted AI, accept Sora?
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Can Hollywood, which once resisted AI, accept Sora?
For Sora to become an integral part of the film and television production industry, OpenAI has more hurdles to overcome than just winning over studio executives.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Mu Mu
Just one month after the launch of Sora, OpenAI's AI-generated video model, the company is already planning to bring it to Hollywood and advocating its integration into film production. In recent weeks, OpenAI has been actively engaging with executives from multiple entertainment and media companies in Los Angeles.
In mid-February, shortly after OpenAI unveiled Sora, select professionals in the film and television industry were granted early access to test the model. By late February, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap led a team to conduct initial meetings with Hollywood insiders, demonstrating Sora’s capabilities. A few days later during the Oscars weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended several high-profile parties across Los Angeles.
A month on, early testers from the film industry have begun sharing their results—among them directors and actors—and the feedback has been nothing short of “astonishing.”
In pushing Sora forward, OpenAI has adopted a different strategy than it did with ChatGPT—prioritizing enterprise (B2B) adoption first. From a commercial standpoint, this makes perfect sense. But for Sora to become an integral part of filmmaking, OpenAI must clear more hurdles than just winning over studio executives. After all, Hollywood launched one of the strongest "anti-AI" protests just last year.
Positive Feedback from Industry Professionals
To date, Sora remains unavailable to the public. Instead, OpenAI has directed its efforts toward Hollywood—the global epicenter of film production. Early recipients of Sora testing access from industries including film, music, and advertising have recently released sample videos created using the model.
Among these, the first short motivational film co-created with Sora, titled *Balloon Man*, has drawn significant attention. Both the visual finesse and cinematographic techniques are remarkably smooth. Fine details such as human body hair and blood vessels are clearly visible, and even subtle interactions like feet stepping on grass are rendered with striking realism. Sora also generated subtitles and voiceover for the piece.
The short was produced by a three-person team. Directors Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg previously earned nominations and awards at major international film festivals between 2013 and 2014 for their animated short *Noah*. Actress Sidney Leeder, who stars in Netflix’s *iZombie*, also participated as both performer and producer.
The professional team expressed strong praise for Sora’s capabilities. “Now we have the ability to expand stories we once thought impossible,” said director Walter. “What truly excites us is how it enables completely surreal creations—this is a new era of abstract expressionism.”
Creating surreal content with Sora resonated deeply with other creators like Don, who used the model to generate unusual animal characters: a bird with a deer’s head, a shark with octopus legs, or flying pigs.
Don, an augmented reality content creator, has long explored fantastical hybrid creatures in his work. “Now I can prototype ideas much more easily, then fully build these 3D characters and place them within spatial computing environments,” he said, noting Sora’s advantage in transcending conventional physical laws and traditional thinking patterns.
Creative studio Native Foreign used Sora to produce a series of video clips based on original concepts that had been shelved indefinitely due to budget and resource constraints.
“I’ve already seen how it will change the way I approach both client work and personal projects,” said Nik Kleverov, creative director at Native Foreign.
Until now, public assessment of Sora’s capabilities relied solely on official demo videos or indirect tests requested via Twitter mentions to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This second-hand method left many skeptical about Sora’s true potential. Now, however, firsthand evaluations from third-party professionals are emerging.
After viewing these professionally crafted Sora-generated videos, netizens reacted with renewed astonishment. One popular meme declared: “SORAWOOD has arrived!”
Netizens coin the term "SORAWOOD"
OpenAI’s decision to target the film industry before releasing Sora to the general public marks a sharp departure from its ChatGPT rollout strategy. Prioritizing B2B over consumer (C2C) adoption may be closely tied to Sora’s commercialization path.
Compared to text-generating AI, video generation is far more costly—in both time and computational resources.
Cheng Cheng, a master’s graduate in software engineering from Tsinghua University, estimated on Zhihu that generating one minute of video with Sora costs approximately 1,500 times more than generating 1,000 tokens with GPT-4. “Given GPT-4’s pricing of $0.06 per 1k tokens, Sora might charge around $90 for one minute of video,” he speculated. As for processing time, “with 8 x A800 GPUs, it would take over three hours (though this can be accelerated with multiple machines); with 8 x H800 GPUs, roughly half an hour.”
Given the high cost, video generation technology like Sora may not be viable for mass consumer use. Targeting business clients with real commercial needs offers a clearer path to profitability. Thus, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap’s outreach to Hollywood appears strategically sound.
But whether Sora can smoothly enter Hollywood is another matter entirely.
How Much Does Hollywood Need Sora?
It’s well known that Hollywood’s success lies in cinematic industrialization—a mature ecosystem of standardized production processes, technical stages, and specialized teams working in concert, with final products tested through market-driven box office performance.
Now, as AI seeks entry into Hollywood, it remains unclear exactly how deeply it can integrate into each stage of production or what outcomes it might yield. While definitive results are still pending, tensions between humans and AI have already erupted.
Last year, when text-generating AIs like ChatGPT swept the globe, Hollywood screenwriters went on strike. Rallying under the “anti-AI” banner, they voiced years of frustration over low pay and excessive workloads. The arrival of emotionless AI threatening to replace creative jobs prompted them to strike first.
In May 2023, negotiations between the Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing 11,000 writers, and Hollywood studio executives collapsed, leading to a full walkout.
The writers’ strike soon expanded into a broader Hollywood actors’ strike in solidarity. In July 2023, 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) received an email announcing an imminent strike. On July 14, the strike officially began, requiring all union members to halt performances, singing, interviews, and related activities.
As a result, lead actors Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. abruptly left the London premiere of *Oppenheimer* in compliance with union directives. During the promotional tour for *Barbie*, some cast members partially withdrew appearances. Productions such as *Deadpool 3*, *Venom 3*, and Netflix’s adaptation of *The Three-Body Problem* were all temporarily disrupted.
Thus, in the highly industrialized world of Hollywood, practitioners staged their first major resistance against AI.
Resistance isn’t limited to writers—audiences too remain skeptical of current AI-generated content. Marvel’s *Secret Invasion* used AI for its opening sequence, drawing sharp criticism: “One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.” Despite visually impressive output, the scene lacked depth upon closer inspection and lost the artistic soul of Marvel’s earlier hand-drawn works.
Some fans criticized recent Marvel adaptations as feeling overly technological and “insincere,” contrasting them with Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, *The Boy and the Heron*—a purely hand-drawn animation painstakingly crafted over seven years by Studio Ghibli—which recently won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
While AI poses a threat to workers, it presents clear benefits to studio executives. Amid a struggling entertainment market, AI’s ability to reduce costs and boost efficiency is highly appealing to management.
Media reports indicate that filmmaker Tyler Perry canceled an eight-billion-dollar, four-year expansion plan for his studio complex due to the emergence of AI video tools. The project, spanning 330 acres and including 12 soundstages, may now be shelved thanks to AI’s growing production capabilities.
Clearly, as an AI tool, Sora will face an ongoing tug-of-war in Hollywood between those resisting and those embracing AI. How deeply it integrates into film production workflows will ultimately depend on how significantly it outperforms traditional methods.
Based on current demonstrations, Sora excels particularly in generating surreal visuals, offering substantial support for creative ideation and realization. However, in simulating realistic scenes, Sora still struggles with accurate understanding of physics—something OpenAI itself acknowledges. Another challenge is Sora’s ability to generate long-form videos, which remains untested at scale and demands immense computational power at considerable cost.
Sora still has a long road ahead if it hopes to make its mark in Hollywood.
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