The Rest Is Entertainment - Have Gucci Made The World’s Worst Film?

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Why did Gucci bin their red carpet for a absurd 30-minute movie? Will a new AI generated movie kill Pixar and Dreamworks? Is Amelia Dimoldenberg Britain's greatest influencer? Richard and Marina review 'The Tiger', the new absurdist movie by Gucci's new creative director 'DENMA'. Is this the worst film of all time, and is all of culture heading in that direction? Chicken Shop Date, the deadpan dating show, turns 10 this year. What is the secret sauce behind the show's success? And finally, a budget animation film is out next year that is produced entirely by OpenAI - the pair argue if this is good, or bad news for Hollywood. Recommendations: Marina: The Dawn Of The Post Literate Society - James Marriott (Substack) / The Rehearsal (Sky) Richard: Freddie Flintoff's Field Of Dreams (iPlayer) Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com The Rest Is Entertainment is proudly presented by Sky. Sky is home to award-winning shows such as The White Lotus, Gangs of London and The Last of Us. Requires relevant Sky TV and third party subscription(s). Broadband recommended min speed: 30 mbps. 18+. UK, CI, IoM only. To find out more and for full terms and conditions please visit Sky.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Adam Thornton Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Bex Tyrell Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Sky. Now, whether it's Scorsese and De Niro, Brits and a queue, or Glenn Powell and a slow-motion entrance into frame, some things are just better together. And Sky and Netflix do just that. Two heavyweight storytellers side by side on the Sky Essential TV package for just £15 a month, all in one place and on one bill. Call it the full ensemble. Sky Originals bringing gangs of London and the Day of the Jackal, Netflix delivering global obsessions like Squid Game and Wednesday. sky atlantic discovery plus and more than 90 other channels to that list and you've got the kind of line-up that bends the week around it turning ordinary evenings into events sky and netflix together for 15 pounds a month premium shows endless choice and a lineup that feels complete all in one place visit sky dot com to start requires relevant sky tv and third-party subscriptions sky essential tv includes a selection of sky channels 18 plus uk channel islands and eye of man only

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Resters Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very well. So it's, I listen, just pulling the curtain back briefly. It's sort of 9 o'clock on a Monday morning.

And I don't wish to reopen the Spotify snack drawer annals. But what have you just eaten before we went on air? I've had my breakfast, but I've also had a packet of pork scratchings. Yeah. Some sort of off-brand pork scratching as well. Yeah, like foregrounds the fact on the front that, you know, it contains no carbohydrate. It's like, yes, but it is a pork-scratching that I'm eating at 855.

Yeah. It's the sort of pork scratching you'd see on Dragon's Den. Yeah. What are we talking about this week? We're in the middle of fashion weeks, Richard. And we're talking about there wasn't a Gucci fashion show this time. They have a new designer at the helm, who is Beyond Zoolander, and they had a 30-minute film, which we're going to talk about.

I have to say, I had not heard of this gentleman. I had obviously not heard of this film. I have now heard of him. I have watched this film. I am very, very, very much looking forward to talking about it. It's quite something. It's quite a lot there. We're also going to talk about chicken shop dates.

Oh. Why it's been a huge hit, what it means for talent, all that kind of stuff. And we're also going to talk about critters, a new animation that's being made that's got something very significant about it that might just blow everything apart. Anyway, we'll get to that bit in the second half. That's really good. You're really learning that sort of. not giving so much. You know, just saying, oh my goodness,

and you will not believe number seven on this list. One of the things you said to me while I was eating the scratching was that I was unproducible. And look what you made me do. And now look at you. Now look at me. That was really impressive.

With my producer's hat on, I think we want to start the podcast now. Let me talk to you about Gucci and Demna, right? We're in the middle of all the fashion weeks. And Gucci traditionally shows in Italy at Milan Fashion Week. But this time, it didn't have a fashion show. It had a 30-minute movie, fictional, with a whole story, you know, directed by Spike Jones and Helena Raine. It stars Demi Moore, Edward Norton, Ed Harris, Kiki Palmer, Elliot Page, Alia Shawcat.

Kendall Jenner. Kendall Jenner, yeah. And so instead of a fashion show, they had this premiere. And all the stars sort of turned up, and then they went in and they were. this movie. Gucci has a new designer at the helm, a guy called Demna, and he launched his own label originally, and then he went to Balenciaga. Gucci is owned by Kerring, which is a luxury brand sort of umbrella, and they're the biggest brand under that thing, and they get mentioned on the earnings call, and their sales have been doing really, really badly. Okay? So they need to have

a strong message with this guy out of the gate. There's a hilarious New York Times profile of Demna, which I strongly recommend reading. He's with Nicole Kidman. They've only just met each other. They each have their hands on the other person's hard. And they stay like that silent, staring at each other for two minutes. It is her preferred way of connecting with someone, apparently. When you say connecting with somebody, she'll do that in the street if you go up to her and say I'm a big fan.

I think her bodyguard will take you down, and will cut you down like a side. I bet that's her actual preferred way of connecting with someone. I think you're okay. He has compared his job on previous occasions to Demeter Christ carrying the cross. One of the fashion shows I thought these models had to sort of weigh through, I mean, what looked like slurry, it was absolutely mad, looking absolutely horrendous and ill, and there were horrible things like big piles of mud, Kanye West, this is before

the descent into performative Nazism, but he, they had to sort of encounter him along the cat. He's very, very avant-garde. Well, that, but he's, he is a genius at marketing. Yeah. And when he joined Balenciaga, revenue was $350 million, and when he left, it was $2 billion. Okay, so let's talk about the film. because that's why we're talking like this.

It's called the tiger. It appears to be based on some central question. Like, if you're in a room with a tiger, would you try and sort of fight it or let it devour you? I have to say, the stabs at profundity are desperate. Yes, it's set in a slightly kind of a near future, an imagined future, where Demi Moore is a Gucci. She's a Barbara Gucci, yeah.

And she runs Gucci, but she's also chief executive of California. You know, Gucci bought California at this point. Her children. Her children, Elliot Page, who's her sort of chief exec. Edward Norton, who is her stepson by a previous marriage, who believes in the rapture and we're all about to get picked up by aliens. Ed Harris turns up as a vanity fair journalist. Yeah, vanity fair matters in this.

Yes, it's funny. It's fancy world. I mean, AI has taken over in the entire world, but still a vanity fair journalist is on enormous expenses. I don't say it still matters. I mean, it matters again, because let's face it, it doesn't mean, vanity fair is in what it was. I wonder if you're the only person in Britain who has said vanity fair is not what it used to be within minutes of eating a bag of pork scratches. Yeah.

So she's in the beautiful house. The family all come for a meal. Everyone takes some sort of mild hallucinogenic. They have good and bad trips. There's like conversations about money, uh, style, taste, life, meaning. What is fashion? What are clothes? What would you do?

in a room with a tiger. All of what they were wearing with the clothes in the collection. That's the point, isn't it? So instead of a catwalk. All of the family are wearing, the fake family are wearing the clothes. And he showed it at Milan Fashion Week, and they all turned up again in the clothes. And they had, and Gwyneth Poucher, other people. I mean, I have to say, more people turned up to that than you would get to a premium.

This is the thing that most people have talked. This is the breakout of all the fashion weeks. What's fascinating about it is that we've talked about this how many times before, when you can get people to do your publicity for free, they've obviously spent a lot of money on this because they've got big stars and they've got big director, very big directors. Because in the end, ads, whilst beautiful,

some people flick past them. In fact, a lot of people flick past them. By the way, the clothes in this does not really a coherent theme to any of it at all. This is sort of memeable. If it's not memeable, does it even work? And as I say, lots of these brands are in trouble and they've got to find a way

pseudo-organic moments where everyone feels like, oh hang on it'd be really fun if I tagged myself and said I was last snob or whoever it is so like by the way everyone's doing that they already know that you're going to do that yeah you could interview to me more about this you could interview ed harris you could i don't know you could interview the directors i've got a couple of questions for them for sure yeah why did you do this i'm assuming a they got paid and b like Gucci give them clothes right and that's probably nice this some actors love getting clothes right that's that's that's some actors you think i think

your favourite thing about acting is that you get given clothes afterwards. Well, as we discussed when we were out on Friday night, rich, a lot of rich people just cannot stand to pay for things. You could use your salary. Do we want to buy the stuff? But now people are saying, oh, lots of actors on the awards ceremony circuit

are wearing stuff that you haven't yet seen on the catwalks. And that's because why wouldn't you push it on an actor who someone's going to talk about and you see, oh, what goodness, you've got a real amazing look at the Cannes Film Festival. and then we're going to later see that. It was totally sacrosanct the debut of the fashion collection of the fashion show. It's not anymore because you need those cultural moments. All of these things, you might have felt different about that kind of selling out in the 90s.

People now don't feel the same about so-called selling out. You've got generations who've grown up being advertised to all the time around the things they're watching or in the middle of them, just like with a kind of rude stop, you've got to watch an advent you carry on. The idea of product placement is such an antiquated day. term to that generation. Yeah, I'm still from the TV generation where you'd have to put a letter P in the corner of the screen if you, you know, if there was product placement and something. And now this whole, as you say, there's really, really A-list talent behind the camera and in front of the camera. There's no one's dressing up the fact that there's anything other than a Gucci advert.

Right at the beginning, we see that the people are called Gucci. Everyone is dressed in Gucci. And that that seems to be absolutely fine. No one seems to mind about that. It gives me some hope for our beleaguered content industry. So the phenomena here is adotainment, which is these days brands have to create product. They have to create their own content that people will willingly watch and willingly share. They have to create the vibes. It almost doesn't quite matter what the thing is. But if you ask what is fashion, what is it?

It's something that's in the air. It's wanting to be part of something. It's a sort of compulsion. You will rarely go a day on television without there being adjudication. documentary, which is behind the scenes at M&S, or Asda at Christmas, or, you know, all of the supermarkets have branded content on channels, which they are part funding as well. This is, this is the world that all of these brands have to get into. And at one end of it, you have the tiger with Demi Moore and Ed Norton and this absurdness. And on the other hand, you have pound

shop wars. But it's the same thing. It's about brands, and it's about brands understanding that You cannot put just a stationary advert in a newspaper or even online these days. No one's clicking, you know, people are clicking off after five seconds. It is about creating something that people are watching through choice, sharing through choice. And this world now where you will not find a brand which does not have a content division now. You will not find a brand who isn't employing agencies to make them content, which are designed not to go out as bummer. adverts or not to go out as print adverts but to go out as pieces of content which can be

shared by other human beings that's that industry now the one good thing about it is i think is someone's got to make all of that stuff and coming from an industry where people are losing their jobs those are the people who are very very very good at making it and it's so shallow yeah because like all of these things i actually read a really interesting article the um the other week which i'll try and find and put in the show notes i can't about how everything all interior design trends now have just had to become a sort of two-word tag. And they're not really, you know, because people want to just tag and make every single aesthetic simply communicable in two words, which is an antithesis of depth. And it's not about sort of deeply understanding

people. It's just like a sort of, it's like these little glib postmodern jokes who are like, oh, I get it, I get it, I get it. It's all, it's scroll culture and there's no depth to it at all. But that's what advertising has always had to be necessarily. You've got 30 seconds to get, you know, you're making a vacuum cleaner in the same way that five other companies are and you've got to get across a vibe, a two-word vibe as to why this would be the one you buy tomorrow. But now that's writ large across the big works of art. But if you're saying that it could get, then it will demean the depth of that. Yes, it will.

Because the generation growing up now have grown up with that and they'll have fun with it and they'll play with that. They understand that perfectly well and they will make things that play on that and they will bend the culture. to what they would like it to be, which has always been the way. You know, we absolutely, we're a product of the sort of television and the sort of advertising that happened in the 50s and 60s

and 70s, and we were absolutely informed by that and we made our programmes in reference to that and, you know, the pendulum swings, you know, one way or another. And this generation will make extraordinary things, I suspect, with the client's own money that speak to the climate in which they grow up. I don't think that will be possible, and I think that I'm actually going to recommend something when we get to the recommendation section.

Is it port scratchings? Because by the way, we've been paid a lot. And I don't think anyone would notice that we've been paid quite a lot of money by the sport scratchings people this morning. I can't even remember their name. It's like a fake. It's a pretty bad name. It's not a real company. None of the people in the snap basket, you've never heard their name before.

They all feel like somebody just left Eaton and their dad knew a venture capitalist and they've, Their dad is a venture capitalist. Yeah. And he said you can run your pork scratching company for two years and then you have to get a job. And then you have to come and work at my venture capital firm. I think it's interesting. I think the proof will be in whether Demet is able to revive the fortunes of Gucci and make people. And I think to some extent, I mean, it's quite a good start in that just by doing this one thing, it's my by far the most talked about thing.

And because lots of people thought, is he actually any good? I don't know he's actually, he's very, very good at marketing. Oh my God, he's ridiculous. He's ridiculous at marketing, virality, understanding that kind of essential. He's a very interesting guy. The more I read about him, the more I sort of liked him. I know.

I mean, I love, I love that. And he gets results and you have to admire that. The, can I, the two directors who made the film, they're just a great quote. I'm not saying they took it seriously. But I think this is in Vanity Fair. actually. It might have been in the New Yorker, but the interview said, what was it like having two people direct a film, Spike Jones?

First, we did a kind of mind-meld, a kind of six-week meditation, like eight hours a day to foster non-verbal communication. I recommend it for any kind of collaboration. Maybe they had their hand on the heart for eight hours a day instead of two minutes. What a lightweight, Nicole Kim, isn't. We live in an absolutely absurd world. It is mental. The tiger, it is called.

You can find it on YouTube. the tiger. I find it everywhere. Do you let us know how quite how far you make it through? Join us in the completest club. Exactly. We will be sending out badges to anyone who can get all the way through. Shall we go to a break?

Yes, we shall. What are we going to be talking about afterwards? Chicken Shop Date, which is, I'd say, an entirely different proposition to the Gucci Tiger film. It might be the exact inverse of it. Quite right. Okay. See you after the break. This episode is brought to you by Sky,

where you can watch unmissable shows, including the final farewell of the award-winning Sky original comedy, Brassick. Seven series later, the gang from Hawley are bowing out, still chasing schemes with full conviction. Brassick charges through its biggest challenge yet, like a group that never learned the meaning of last orders.

It's chaos with a curtain call. Joe Gilgan, Michelle Keegan, Dominic West, big names you might expect on three entirely different billboards, yet all improbably colliding in a northern town with more calamities than bus routes. This time is old enemies resurfacing, long-lost family reappearing and trouble following them at every turn. But rather than an ending, it feels like a send-off tru-to-form, messy, riotous and impossible mistake by anyone else. They're leaving the stage the way icons should, with a proper bang,

a finale stitched together with mischief, misfits and just enough mayhem to feel like Hawley to the end. Watch the final farewell of Brassick Now on Sky with new episodes weekly. Relevant Sky TV subscription. While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting. Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at dynamic.ca.cath. Welcome back, everybody.

Now, we're going to talk about 10 years of chicken shop date. Yes, 10 years old chicken shop date. When you looked at what the future content was going to be, I didn't think it was going to be quite so poultry-based, but with this and hot ones, two of the big formatted bits of YouTube content. So people who don't know chicken shop date, there's a media de Moldenberg,

who's an actor, comic, writer, and she takes interviewees on a date in various London chicken shops, very, very garrishly lit and interviews them over chicken nuggets. The light conceit is she's looking for love and she's taking people for a date and this is a funny place to take people for a date.

But she has now been going 10 years. It's huge. She's got 3.5 million subscribers. She did one recently with Andrew Garfield, which went wildly viral and got kind of 10 million views. And firstly, absolute fair play to Amelia de Moldenberg

for putting this together and running this for 10 years. years and being quite so successful. But I'm interested in it in terms of what it means for, because she started it when she was 21 on YouTube. She's a student. She grew out of a youth club magazine column she'd had, you know, that she'd had. The idea of sort of being a character, I suppose, looking for love and going on dates with people. And chicken shots being a very, very bad place to have a date. She instinctively understood that was funny. And you know, you start interested. few in people in in that context and it it builds from there now in every other generation so when she's 21 she decides to do this as a youtube thing so she's filming it as well very first one was with a

british rapper called gets who she recently did her revisit with which is which is really really worth watching and if you've not seen it it is i think she records for 45 minutes or so but the actual episodes are about eight minutes 10 minutes occasionally a little bit longer heavily edited her interviewing somebody, a little bit of flirting, a lovely kind of background stuff of people frying chips and things. The interstitial stuff is like fries going down and stuff, which I love. It's got a very strong visual identity. And off the back of this, because it is so huge, she is now hugely in demand with brands.

She does lots of, you know, red carpet interviews. She loves doing, she really likes doing red carpet, which she's sort of made for. Yeah, she's amazing. She was the sort of official Oscars social media person, but she made them put and red carpet interviewer on her job title. And she's done lots and lots of those. The Andrew Garfield story is sort of amazing. You know, they met a couple of times on red carpets.

And, I mean, there is, you know, I always, you want to believe that she'll find love with him. Yes. There is a palpable chemistry. Oh, my God, it's amazing. It's like, and someone's, like, people were saying, oh, my God, this is literally the best rom-com of the year, and it's a 12-minute film or something in a chicken shop.

But that's quite a recognizable sort of heroin, isn't it? There's something very much about that episodic, that reminded me when I'm sort of thinking about it, a bit about something like, you know, the original Bridget Jones column or something like, you know, she's someone who's looking for love. It's a persona of what she is on camera.

Well, that's the thing about it. A couple of things about it, because it does make you questions. So she, Emilia de Moldenberg, is very funny. So she's a comic talent. She is a comic talent. For that question. And she is not working on television.

She's not working on legacy television. That's not a thing that she went into and it's not a thing she's particularly interested in pivoting to. And a couple of ways of looking at it, which are, well, then it means that legacy media is, you know, is crazy. They've lost their minds if they don't have a place for this. But chicken shop date, she does one a month and they're eight minutes long. So if you are legacy television, you can't do anything with that. You can't do anything with something that's eight minutes long that's on once a month.

So it's not like, oh my God, you miss that or you miss chicken shop date. You think what we missed this eight minutes once a month? Of course we didn't miss it. We don't have a place for that. But if you are creative, and I've always said the fascinating thing with any creators, especially at the start of their career, they think what's the possible shortest journey between me having an idea and people seeing that idea? And if you wanted to do Chicken Shop Date as a television program, I would say probably two years

between having the idea and it being on and the 50 people have given you their opinion on what it should be. Another 50 people have told you who your first guest should be. Another 50 people are in the edit. But if you're Amelia Demoldenberg or anyone from her generation or this next generation, you can go, oh no, listen, I did it as a column. There's cheap ways to do. It costs about six grand an

episode. I can fund it. I can make it. And the thing that I have in my brain can go straight to viewers. And that's exactly what she's done. She's created the thing that she wants. So it has that authenticity, which is the reason it's been such a big hit.

one of the key points about this lovely route to market now and the lack of gatekeeping and this sort of community is good stuff has time to rise to the top. If you get it right, you're rewarded. And I think Amelia de Moldenberg, more than sort of anybody, only because she's British and she's from a particular generation, shows what has changed for young creatives. And certainly if I was a young creative now, the avenue that I would be going down, which is doing your own stuff, finding a way to monetise it. I totally agree, and I think it's very interesting how it's changed those traditional forms of interviewing.

I was trying to think when I knew we were going to talk about this. I was thinking, when was the last time I saw like a really epic moment on a legacy interview show? I mean, that Andrew Garfield thing is so epic and Cher and things like that. She's done, but she's also done lots of things and you think, gosh, something really amazing comes through in this. But when was the last time you kind of, maybe I'm just not watching enough of them, but I don't really remember those things. And I think it's really interesting that, sorry to talk about the US, but I think they're so market-driven, those network, late-night shows. They've all incorporated, essentially, stuff from this type of YouTube sensibility.

Things that are meant to go viral and that are short. So you've got Seth Myers does day-drinking with Seth Myers, which is, so he'll go out with the guests and he'll get drunk with them. And it's not happening on the set. You know, it's a sort of designed to go like that. Obviously, there was carpal karaoke. Jimmy Fallon's got that thing. the wheel of musical impressions or whatever

they're all trying to do these little things that are left field and that are designed to disrupt really the traditional interview process that they are kind of the masters of because they run those shows and they sit behind a desk and that's what those shows have always done

but they're trying to disrupt themselves now within their own thing in order to go viral so that they're like these people who I mean were a billion years of having a late-night show But if you're Seth Myers or if you're Jimmy Fallon or any of these people, you are feeding a machine that eats money. Yeah. You know, if you have to have these viral things because someone is paying you an absolute fortune to make these shows and someone is, you know, and the cost of making them is huge and you're working for a corporation that needs to return value to its shareholders. If you are just a regular 21-year-old creative, you can do these things and you're doing.

doing it for $5,000 an episode and playing by entirely different rules. You get the questions in advance. The publicist, you know, the reason as someone goes on a chat show, an actor often who is maybe not, you know, who often says other people's words, and then they come out with these perfect anecdotes because they know what they're going to get us. And everyone sort of knows that, and it's phony. And the whole point of Amelia de Moldenberg's thing is that, I mean, some of the questions, and she deliberately edits it to make it look even more awkward and even more, you know,

She'll let them talk, but then that anecdote will just, she'll happily kill her darlings. And unless it's funny, it doesn't get in. Yeah. And you can edit in a different way than you can if you're sitting down with someone opposite the desk on a late night show and doing the normal interview. Or even on the sofa, all of those things, she deliberately has disrupted. They don't know what's coming next. She, you know, when you hear her say it, you almost think she doesn't know what's coming next. And sometimes it's improvised.

She's incredibly well prepared, actually. That's the key. Which is the same short, Sean Evans on hot ones. Oh, my God. I mean, his research is ridiculous. The key is look ramshackle, but do the work. And that's always been the key on any of those great things. It's like Graham Norton.

The reason Graham Norton is a brilliant chat show is he has done all of the work, but then he sort of throws it away and pretends he has it. And that's the absolute key. The TV producer and me looks at her doing 10 years, which is very, very impressive. And you can see her thinking, I mean, you hear talking about it sometimes about what's next. which is interesting. She's 10 years into this, what is quite a new profession, the idea of being a YouTuber and being someone who essentially is their own brand and their own creator. And her things who say, they're eight minutes long and they're once a month. And, you know, it's harder for her to do

like a half-hour chat show because she is slightly still playing a character because the very, very beginning of this, the genesis of this when she's 17 is, oh, I'm slightly going to take one step aside from who I am and slightly pretend I'm doing a date. I am doing a date. but also pretending I'm doing a date. Yeah. And so she's never quite been able to be exactly herself. The bits where you see her being herself, which you see more and more often these days in the interviews,

she's unbelievably good at. And at some point she will work out, oh, do you know what, I can actually just be me in this. Well, I heard she's writing a rom-com, and I wonder if that's true. And she said it's in the chicken shop date space. And that made me think, I mean, sorry, this is a real sidebar,

and we'll have to talk about this on a completely separate item at another time, but are YouTube going to do like YouTube premium? where you're starting to have because if she does do a romantic comedy, I mean maybe YouTube would release it in theatres for one week for reasons as previously discussed or does it just

does she do something on YouTube? Are they actually going to eventually? Because all of these people, you can see like Mr. Beast saying, oh I want to go to Amazon because I want to do this game show and I want to do things that they still slightly believe legacy media or films or whatever it is. They still all have that hankering for something

a bit like that to some extent. Are they just going to bring it all under the YouTube umbrella and they're going to have something like YouTube. I've said YouTube premium. I know you can have YouTube premium, but what I mean is, is they're going to be in some of that as well? Because, you know, we already said that they won the streaming wars, Netflix, but now they're obviously, we know their major competitor is YouTube. And as I said, Ted Sarandas got really prickly when asked about it, because that's the one time I've ever seen him lose his cool because he knows it's coming. And I wonder whether they will move into something like that. Well, I think as production costs, I think it would

sort of happen the other way around, which is production costs are going to absolutely come down so much with new technologies and AI and things like that, that is going to make things look premium at a much cheaper price point. But if I'm immediate demoldenberg, the one thing I feel when I see her is, it makes you feel quite tired because I think, my God, she's had to graft, and it's all on her, and it's her company, and I know she's got a very small team, but she has been selling herself every month is this new thing how do we promote this how do we promote that and the one thing you have in legacy media is somebody else is looking after a lot of that stuff for you and somebody is paying you and you know what you're getting paid and it doesn't matter if you get half the ratings this week that you did last week

the money is still coming in so she's had 10 years now of having to do that not only doing the creative stuff but doing the business stuff and and recognizing that all of her money depends on who she is which is quite a scary place to be, I would say. And also that they say, I think this is changing. They say that the median age at which people sort of slightly change from, you know, watching their screens to watching the big TV as kind of 27, late 20s or something like that. And she's got an audience who's grown up with her who was sort of in that demographic. So it's do they follow her?

My view would be they absolutely will follow her that that median age will go up and up and up and up. And maybe they're watching things on big screen, but they're watching. YouTube on the big screen but I think she's like a perfect example of doing something very very smart at the age of 21 10 years ago that other people were not doing and now everybody is doing but she's got a 10 year head start and I think honestly absolute hats off to her for making completely charming and wonderful and a real British success story exactly that making great content doing it on our own terms and yeah it's um here's to another 10 years of it and you know maybe romance with Andrew Garfield.

Oh, that would be nice. That would be nice. The dream. Now, talking of AI and lower production costs, we want to talk about, say, a little animated film called Critters. Critters. Now, Open AI is making a movie. It has to happen.

Critters was a little movie. It was a short written and directed by a guy called Chad Nelson, who's a sort of creative at Open AI, which I think is interesting, but also somehow, you know, potentially very sinister department. Anyhow. And the premise of this little short was that a David Attenborough type voiceover comes to a jungle or a forest of little woodland creatures, which are, you know, they're not recognisable, they're not squirrels or anything. They're kind of, it's kind of like pixarlet creatures.

I'm going to call them critters. Critters, they're critters. By the way, in case it's not obvious, it is critters with a Z. Listen, we were all assuming that. Yeah. You could hear the Zed. It was a hard Z. So they combined the visuals from Dahl E with...

Which is Open AI's video. With their old one, yeah. With human voice actors. And they showed it at lots of festivals. And then he later remastered it with Sora, which is kind of the next generation version of it. And they are now going to use this as the basis for, or a jumping off point for a feature film,

which uses AI throughout pre-production, production and post. It will have human voice actors. And they're doing it with Vertigo films who are based in London. And two of the people who wrote Paddington in Peru are going to write it. And what's interesting about it, well, lots of things are interesting about it. But they're sort of saying, oh, in the way that Toy Story revolutionised animation, this is like the next level of that. And also they're saying, oh, don't forget when Toy Story came out, everyone's going,

oh, my God, CGI, we want traditional animation. And again, it's exactly the same as that. It's just a new technology. This is what they're saying. But what it means, obviously, is that animation, as we know, it's incredibly expensive and it takes a very, very long time to do, even with computers, even when they're not drawing the cells, taking their hands as they used to in a heyday of Walt Disney.

So it's going to affect timing and labour. Now, what's fascinating about it is they say, we're going to make it in nine months, which for an animated film is, I mean, you know, I think something like Coco, for Pixar, which I love. by the way, took seven years. Elio, which, for Pixar, it took five years. They kind of knew they had a turkey, which was I had to move the release date,

so it didn't interfere with an earnings call. And it involved thousands of people, and it was their lowest opening ever. It probably cost them $200 million without marketing, and it was their lowest opening ever for Pixar. Nobody saw it. It was like Pixar's worst ever. So this is nine months. $30 million.

$30 million, okay? It still sounds like quite a lot. Yeah. Well, they're going to take it, they want to take it to Cannes, so we'll see if French cineasts have something to say about that. I think they'll be fine about it. They're always so relaxed. And maybe they'll find a distributed there.

Maybe they'll already have one. Well, the family genre, as we know, is doing brilliantly at the box office. Kids sort of keep the lights on in cinemas to some extent. But animation, original animation is not. it's original animation is all of this stuff that's doing really well is known IP or it's based on video games or um it's sequels or whatever like inside act too but actually animation original animation is in trouble um and films are they take so long to do anyone who wants to just do a simple animation story it's almost enough to them because they're spending so much money on

them they take so long that the idea and actually you know lots of of people who, I've talked to people who have written quite deep into these and then just come off them and said, I can't do it anymore because everything has to be so detailed. Like, they don't leave anything to chance because it's so expensive. They've become these things that by virtue of how expensive and how long they take, every sort of... And again, that idea that if you're a creative, what you want is the shortest possible route between your joke and an audience and something like animation, it's the exact opposite of that. How can you make a zeitgeisty film? How can you,

do something exuberant, something that just... Unless you're South Park and you're deliberately low-fire. And that's different and that's TV. And, you know, how can you have low-budget indie hits in animation? You can't. And they don't exist. They're about to. They're about to.

Well, yeah, because this is going to cost $30 million. Another interesting thing, actually, in Scott Galloway's news, Prof G newsletter recently, he compared the cast and crew of Fantastic Four with... and the staff of a number of public companies. There are 3,271 strong crew of 5.000 does it for, and I appreciate they're going to hopefully go on to other work. But, like, Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has only slightly more than that. Like, they have so many more employees than Lyft, than TripAdvisor, than Reddit,

than like, asset management companies. You know, Mr. Beas employees employs 50 people. Yeah. So you're thinking this is such a mad industry where there are that. many people on this. And also you're thinking, hang on a second, a lot of those people on Fantastic Four are in effect and they're in post-production. So people think computers are making films already. They're very, very used to superhero things and animation films that they believe are essentially made by computers, Vertigo films. They say it's human-led, but it's

AI-assisted. And they are, as I say, they're casting it as a sort of experiment to say, who knows, does this $30 million work? Can we do it quickly? Can we get it done in that time. And I think they're also saying that all the artists involved will have something in the back end, which is, I don't hear that since the Clinton administration, Richard. I think that AI is going to take over animation. It just is. And lots of the big studios are not able to make a fully AI animated film at the moment for lots of, you know, for political reasons. And guild's related reasons. And guild related reasons. So you need a smaller player to break the deal, which is what's happening here.

So Vertigo films. You're talking about the little old old underdog open AI? The little studio that could. The little studio that could. But, you know, that's why, you know, oh, no, Vertigo are making it open AI, aren't making anything.

Okay. Because somebody has to do that. And as soon as someone's done it, and then, you know, rest of sure there will be, so Critters is the first one we'll talk about, there will be hundreds of these things. And there's already hundreds of animated shorts. I mean, you know, you can't move for them.

But these feature films, it will look very peculiar in five years. time when people look back and go, sorry, why are you talking about AI making an animated feature film? I mean, they make all of them now. But this is sort of the first cab off the rank. So the second that this is acceptable, the legacy studios will have no other choice, but to say, look, we have to compete on price now. We also have to use this technology. We have to use AI. And so that's all they're waiting for, really. They're waiting for this to become industry standard from some of the smaller players before they can jump in.

There is also an endless supply of money. The one thing we know now is, I think it's an absurd amount of venture capital money is going to AI at the moment. I mean, trillions and trillions and trillions, there is a huge amount of money here to make content to improve the concept, all of those types of things. So AI is going to take over large bits of the entertainment business. Certainly this would be the first one. So it is a question of how do you then protect the human,

element of it. And funny enough, Chad Nelson, the guy you were talking about, who made the very first critters inside. He's consulting on the, I mean, he's heavily involved in the feature version. So he, as you say, is a creative inside a big AI company. I was watching an interview with him that I think I'd had 43 views, but it was, I, uh, one of them was me, I bet. I've heard it very interesting. He was, he was like poster festival. He was talking to someone. And he was saying, look, I, my job, my job, is, he said, when you work this closely with AI, you realize quite how similar everything it produces is. He said, I look at all this stuff. I feel like I'm drowning in a, he describes

it as a sea of sameness. And that's what AI gives you. And he said, my job is always to sit in rooms with people whose job is to code and to create these things. My job is to essentially make this good. My job is essentially to make this humor. My job is to make this funny. my job is to take this in a human direction. And that would be the optimistic view of where this goes. And Critters, as you say, it's got two of the guys who wrote on Paddington in Peru. There's going to be lots of writers for hire

who are doing these things in the near future. And my view has always been in editing, in writing all these AI things. There is an intangible thing that is not something that you can simply copy from what has gone before. It's just a human brain in the room thinking, how is an audience feeling? So I think it's inevitable, and we have to try and protect as much humanity within it as possible.

But the real thing is that there is still a massive, unanswered copyright theft thing going on here. All the time. All of this is based on stolen work. All of it is stolen. So forget for a minute everything else, what's going to happen and we'll work out how that happens. It is stolen. I agree, but don't you think, I mean, do you sense any appetite with any of the governments to do anything about this? I sense, I get, I get approached almost every day by lawyers saying we're going to launch a suit against, you know, these big AI companies.

And quite rightly, by the way, because people are, I mean, literally, people have, so you're just trying to work out, which is the right one. Well, no, just the right way to do it. What's the right approach? who are the right companies to sue because they are going to have to pay because they did steal it. I mean, it's, it is, there are laws in every country. You're not going to get any help of the governments. So it has to be legal. Exactly that. The government's quite, you know, if I was a government, would I really want to, I mean, that's the problem these days. These companies are so enormous. Well, the governments are all captured. And yeah, they've, they've got

enough problems. But so, yeah, it is stolen. Thief has occurred. And creatives who've, you know, it's all very well saying AI is making this. No, AI is looking over every bit of animation ever made and copying it. But if you look at something, okay, let's look at as an example, which you haven't probably talked about, but the Ellison's who have bought Paramount and now want to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, and I think it's a strong likelihood that they will acquire it. You've got Larry Ellison, who I think a couple of weeks ago became the richest man in the world, they're always justly. It was always up and down in those top four, aren't they? Anyway, do you think he is buying it for his Nepo son who, because they want to be, to run a legacy media studio?

Or do you think they're trying to do something much bigger? I think they're trying to do something much bigger. Well, the reason he became the richest man in the world, however briefly, was the huge punts he had taken on. Yeah, and Oracle is, I mean, so I think they want to join things up in a much more significant way. And what they like about Warner's obviously is that it has a huge number of franchises. is just as a sort of speculative idea about this in saying what are they going to do with the fact they've stolen everything.

Say they have Warner's and Paramount together and they start making these because you're going to be saying okay, well try and make me a demon slayer. Here's 30 million. By the way, I'm the richest man of the world. What's the difference? Oh, I don't really like it. It didn't really work.

Do another one. But this is what people have been saying all along, which once the things, the films had become too big to fail, really, and yet they did fail. But hugely expensive animations or hugely expensive kind of studio temple movies or superhero fractures, whatever it is that doesn't work out is a very significant problem if you have a few of them on the books.

So if you can try seeding 10 of them and saying, well, I don't like this one, I don't like that one or this one, you know, go back and do it again. You can constantly adjust these. There's nothing finished ever about these because you can just give it another prompt and it can change it slightly. The same afternoon you got the notes. what happens within Paramount

where they say well we've only used Paramount and Warner stuff why shouldn't we be able to train it on this and then we're going to I think that's what will happen and the employees also feel like

well where else am I going to go if I don't work for these companies there's smaller and smaller number of studios that still exist they're all going to fold because it's Hollywood and they just care about the money it's up to the artists

to push back and that's probably the last front here because it's not going to be the executives. The hope is that we have a sea change and people do want human connection and human art and there will always be brilliant creatives. There's never a generation that has fewer brilliant creatives

than another generation ever. I agree. I agree. I'm one of this generation and not creative. There's always brilliant creatives and they will always be looking for something to do and they will always be looking to find their own niche. And as production costs plummet,

they will be able to make great art as well. As you say, if you're Larry Edison and David, Edison, it's essentially, it's going to be a license to print money. But if you are a true great artist, hopefully there will be options open to you. Either way, you know, we're talking about this. Equally, you might be able to make a fun animation that's zeitgeisty and that doesn't cost $200 million without marketing. Yeah.

I mean, but we're talking about... We're talking about critters here and people will look back on this like the people who sat in the French cinema and thought the train was going to come out of the screen at them because we are. at the very, very beginning of something that is about to become absolutely humongously huge and the money is already baked into it. Everyone's already positioned themselves. That's what every single move in Hollywood is about at the moment is how am I going to take advantage of the huge cost savings and the huge marketing savings and a huge research savings that AI

is going to bring me because it is going to be an absolute boomtown. But I hope that the Amelia de Moldenbergs of this next generation and the writers and the creators and the artists also know that there will be enough people out there who will willingly pay them to make a different sort of art and you can see the beginnings of that industry starting now where people will, fandoms will fund things and that feels like there will be a shadow industry

which hopefully will produce some extraordinary stuff as well. Any recommendations this week? I've got two recommendations. One I meant to make last week, but I had COVID. And this is for an essay, a treatise, written by James Marriott on his cultural capital substack. Lots of people have talked about this. It's called the dawn of the post-literate society. It's so interesting.

If you haven't read it, it's a treatise, as I say, about how culture is becoming post-literate. We're losing the ability to read, to understand. And it's all been killed and it's traceable. to the smartphone and you know it's making people stupid this is what i was thinking about a bit further up the show which was i we can see that iq is declining we can see that literacy i can feel it i can feel mine go and that that that substack by the way james marriott's substack is one of the few things that makes me feel like my IQ might go up a tiny bit it's he's so brilliant well it's full of great ideas and it's written in a way you think oh yeah i get that it's so

i strongly recommend everybody reads this it's absolutely It's fantastic, and lots of people have talked about it anyway. It's called The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. My other recommendation is we don't talk enough about, like, I mean, maybe about Nathan Fielder in this country, but I'm just watching the rehearsal, which you can watch on Sky and now, it is so amazing. I mean, it's obviously a genre of one. I mean, talk about things that you might not pay people to do in the future, but it is the most extraordinary thing. He helps people deal. Have you seen it?

Yes, I have seen it. It's very difficult to describe what it is. He helps people prepare. in the most sort of anal way for difficult life moments or conversations and the level of pre-planning to like close off all the different curveballs life might throw at you for the in a 10-minute conversation is beyond. If you haven't seen it, watch it because I just think he's so amazing. And if you haven't seen Nathan for you, which is his earlier series, I mean, absolutely brilliant. He's sort of in a category of one as well.

I mean, yeah. So if you like the first 20 minutes that you see of him, you've got an awful lot to enjoy. Just stay with it. I mean, there's nothing else like it on telly. Let's put it that way. And I'm heading to IPlayer for their new series of Freddie Flintosh's Field of Dreams, which is where he takes young kids who don't play cricket. This makes it sound so boring and makes them play cricket.

But it's not brilliant. Yeah, it's about kids and it's about teenagehood, and it's about awkwardness, and it's about love and respect and hope. And about him. And these days as well, the first series wasn't, and now it is, and you see what he's been through. He's an extraordinary presence at the heart of this. And you could see in the first series what he gave to these kids, which was beautiful. You now also see what they give to him, which is also beautiful.

Yeah, that's a really wonderful watch. Right. That about wraps us up. We'll be back, as always, for questions and answers on Thursday. And on Friday for our members, we are looking into the history of the Muppets. We're literally looking into the history of everything that happens. happened before they got successful, which is, and we took a really, really, really long time. The Muppet origin story.

The Muppet Origin story. You imagine how much I like this. Yeah. And there's all sorts of twists and turns in that as well. If you want to become a member, add free listening and so on, it's the rest of entertainment.com. You can sign up there. But for everyone else, we'll see you on Thursday. See you on Thursday.

This episode was brought to you by Sky. Skyglass is the new television from Sky, the kind that makes your old Teddy feel like a dress rehearsal. This is the big screen premiere right there in your living room. Because it's not just about pixels and settings, it's about the experience. Skyglass has auto-adjust, which cleverly adapts to whatever you're watching, and the built-in Dolby sound makes dialogue sharper, footsteps nearer, storms louder.

Take the secret world of sound on Sky Nature frogs croak like brass sections, bats click like castanets, and even the hush between feels designed for surround sound. It's less like nature recorded, more like nature remixed. And then there's David Attenborough, his voice warmer than central heating, turning baby Caymans and prowling hyenas into Shakespearean characters. That's when you realize Skyglass doesn't just show TV. It was built to collaborate with it, the unsung producer behind every great scene. Visit sky.com requires relevant SkyTV subscriptions, broadband recommended minimum speed 30 megabits per second 18 plus UK Channel Islands and Isle of Man only