TOM CRUISE MIGHT just be Hollywood’s most analog movie star. He reportedly once grew irate when a crew member suggested that a dangerous stunt be performed by a digital double, yelling: “There is no digital Tom! Just Tom!”
For last summer’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise, who was 61 when the movie hit theaters, actually jumped a motorcycle off a ramp on top of a mountain, let the bike fall down into the canyon, and then parachuted down into the valley below. The complex sequence took a year to plan and shoot. It probably cost a lot of money. There were some computer effects involved, including digitally converting a bike ramp into a stretch of rocky mountain. But there was no digital Tom.
Like many of Hollywood’s top-tier talents, Cruise has spent much of his career fighting against digital encroachments into Hollywood’s processes, especially those that might replace real people. So it was no surprise that Dead Reckoning pitted Cruise’s longtime franchise superspy Ethan Hunt against an omnipresent artificial intelligence known only as “the Entity,” an enemy that was described in the film as “everywhere” and “nowhere,” capable of accessing any digital system and, in the process, “compromising the very truth as we know it.” It was a fitting metaphor for Hollywood’s own fearful struggles against AI.
As the movie rolled out in theaters, Hollywood’s actors and writers unions were going on strike. The unions were concerned about the usual issues—pay rates, benefits, contract transparency, and work expectations. But as much as anything else, they feared for their jobs, worrying they would be made obsolete by generative AI.
“We want to be able to scan a background performer’s image, pay them for a half a day’s labor, and then use an individual’s likeness for any purpose forever without their consent,” is how the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the actor’s guild, characterized the Producers Guild of America’s position. “We also want to be able to make changes to principal performers’ dialogue, and even create new scenes, without
