Hollywood Wants To Expose Big Tech While Becoming Dependent On It

Something strange is happening in Hollywood.

The industry is making a pile of movies about tech billionaires.

Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. Sam Altman. Elizabeth Holmes.

The New York Times sees this as a cultural shift. The old tech founder was the brilliant rebel. Now he is the villain.

Maybe.

But that explanation misses the more uncomfortable part.

The people Hollywood increasingly wants to criticize are becoming part of the business behind Hollywood itself.

Amazon bought MGM for $8.45 billion and now owns one of Hollywood’s oldest studios and one of its largest film libraries.

Google DeepMind just invested about $75 million in A24 and entered a research partnership to build AI tools for filmmaking. Google says the goal is to put its technology directly into the creative process.

And Paramount is trying to complete a $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal is backed by $47 billion of equity from the Ellison family and RedBird Capital, with another $54 billion of debt commitments.

This is bigger than a few billionaires buying movie companies.

The technology business is moving deeper into the financing, ownership and production infrastructure of entertainment.

Now look at Artificial.

Amazon MGM dropped Luca Guadagnino’s nearly finished $40 million film about Sam Altman and OpenAI.

That happened only months after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI and a massive AWS partnership with the company. Amazon is also supposed to provide OpenAI with two gigawatts of Trainium capacity.

Amazon said the movie would be better served by another studio.

Maybe that’s true.

But the conflict doesn’t require anyone to secretly order a movie killed.

The conflict exists because the same company now has billions of dollars riding on the success of the technology company being portrayed.

That is a very different Hollywood from the one that made The Social Network.

And Artificial gets even stranger.

A24 was reportedly among the studios that considered buying the movie. But Google DeepMind had just invested about $75 million in A24, while Thrive Capital, another A24 backer, is also an OpenAI investor.

The movie eventually went to Neon.

Then there is Elon Musk.

Hollywood Reporter reported that Universal was getting cold feet about releasing Alex Gibney’s Musk internationally.

That immediately produced the obvious censorship story.

But then Universal said its plans had not changed and that it remained committed to releasing the film internationally. Variety reported the same thing today, although no overseas release date has been announced.

So I wouldn’t call this evidence that Universal is censoring Musk.

It isn’t.

But it does expose something worth watching.

A filmmaker can make a nearly four-hour documentary attacking one of the world’s most powerful technology executives while the film’s distribution passes through a media system increasingly tied to enormous corporate and political interests.

The old Hollywood-versus-Silicon-Valley story is getting harder to draw.

There isn’t really a clean line anymore.

Amazon is Hollywood.

Google is becoming part of Hollywood.

AI companies are becoming part of Hollywood’s financing and production ecosystem.

And the people running these companies are becoming Hollywood characters.

That creates a strange business incentive.

Hollywood can make money from public anger toward Big Tech while becoming more dependent on Big Tech capital and technology.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

And that may be the more revealing story behind this sudden flood of tech-billionaire movies.

Hollywood isn’t simply making movies about the people taking over the future.

It is increasingly doing business with them.