A24’s “Betrayal” & Netflix’s NBC Wish List

**Julia Alexander** (0:01)
Google does not care about winning an Oscar with an AI-generated film. Google cares about being the foundational technology that Hollywood and YouTube creators and film students use when they start integrating more AI tools into pre-production and post-production.

**Peter Hamby** (0:19)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Huck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Wednesday, July 1st. Today, I'm joined by Julia Alexander. To explain why every cinephile's favorite studio, A24 launched a $75 million partnership with Google's DeepMind, their AI company. A24 fans are deeply concerned that their beloved movie house is selling out to a tech behemoth. But as Julia explains, those fears are off base, at least for now.
I also get Julia's notes on Comcast spinning off NBCUniversal, and which of NBC's properties look most desirable to buyers, including Netflix. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

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Happy Wednesday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. Happy July 1st. Welcome to America 250 Let's go, Team USA. They're playing tonight. Are they gonna lose to Bosnia? I don't know. I hope not. I'm a little worried. Today, I'm joined by Julia Alexander, who wrote a fascinating story a few days ago about A24 doing an unusual partnership with Google's DeepMind AI platform that caused a lot of the artsy-fartsy A24 fans out there to express some concern that AI was taking over the creative mind. We're also going to talk a little bit more about NBCUniversal and Comcast breaking up after all these years. I want Julia's very smart take on that. Julia, good to see you. Do you have a horse in the World Cup, by the way? Canada?

**Julia Alexander** (3:23)
I can't believe on July 1st, you would say American 250 and not Happy Canada Day. To me, one Canadian on staff, Peter.

**Peter Hamby** (3:33)
Can you say right now at the top of your head without looking what the anniversary is? Like we had the bicentennial and then what is this?

**Julia Alexander** (3:40)
No. No.

**Peter Hamby** (3:42)
I only had to look it up because I wrote about it recently. It's the sesquicentennial, I believe. Sesquicentennial. Learn it. Anyway, Happy Canada Day. I'm sorry. At least we are not at the great all-American state fair with nobody else down on the National Mall. That looked really depressing.
Anyway, Julia, let's go to another topic far, far away from Donald Trump. Google and A24.
You wrote about this in What I'm Hearing. A24 announced they are launching a partnership. Google's DeepMind is investing $75 million in the film studio. As I mentioned, beloved by film nerds everywhere. They made Hereditary and Marty Supreme and all the Robert Eggers movies. Weird, cool films. Obviously, they've been around for a while now. Why did they do this? Because it does seem like, if you are an A24 fan, you're a screenwriter in Silver Lake, this feels like a punch to the gut that your beloved production company is selling their souls to big AI. That's what it feels like. What is actually going on here?

**Julia Alexander** (4:48)
As I wrote in the piece, it's such a misread on the situation. Google does not care about winning an Oscar with an AI-generated film. Google cares about being the foundational technology that Hollywood and YouTube creators and film students use when they start integrating more AI tools into pre-production and post-production.
What Google gets out of an A24 partnership, and specifically with DeepMind, is the ability to not necessarily train on the content, that's a big part of the story too, Peter, is that Google is not necessarily going to have access to A24 films, like the library of films, to train their data on, but they're going to better understand through these creatives that they're partnering with, exactly what hurdles need to be fixed within the film industry, so they can better build a tool for it. And Google is not the only company that's kind of doing this with creatives in mind. Netflix acquired Ben Affleck's Interpositive for $600 million.