Earlier this year, several feature-length films made by directors who got their start creating video content for YouTube hit theaters, displaying the creativity and ingenuity of the next generation while also flashing real potential for mainstream financial success.
Unfortunately, the next wave of this new indie wave feels significantly more cynical and more creatively bankrupt. “Gods Don’t Give Gifts” is the latest production of the YouTube-to-cinema pipeline, and it’s a largely AI-generated effort from YouTuber Gossip Goblin. The film is set to hit theaters later this year, and it is leaning hard into the AI-adjacent hype bubble. The latest effort to get the folks who spend way too much time on X to come out to the theater: the promise of a cameo from musician Grimes.
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Grimes has been an AI art booster (or at least optimist) from the jump, which likely shouldn’t come as a surprise that she’d pop up in a project like this. Per the trailer description, Grimes (also known as Claire Boucher) is playing Zaynith Alda, a disaffected aristocrat who pops up in the film’s post-apocalyptic dystopian world. She appears in the trailer alongside YouTuber Mike Majlak, who is apparently a Logan Paul hanger-on.
According to Variety, Grimes ended up in the film because she followed Gossip Goblin (the online moniker of director Zack London) on X and expressed excitement and interest in some of his AI-generated outputs. London asked her if she wanted to star in one of his projects, and she apparently said “yes,” because here we are.
The character Grimes plays apparently already existed in the film but got rewritten to suit her personality. Per Variety, Grimes recorded her lines from home, so it seems while the character was reworked to look like her, she wasn’t actually on screen for any of it. She also apparently breaks the world a little as the only character who doesn’t have a British accent.
Grimes or no, it seems the plan for “Gods Don’t Give Gifts” is to figure out whether it’s possible to get audiences to actually care about AI movies. The team behind it has been on a full-on marketing push, claiming that they intend to submit the film for the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars, according to IndieWire, where it’ll go up against films like “Wildwood,” a stop-motion epic that took hundreds of artists nearly two decades to make—as opposed to this film that seems to have worked Grimes in with a couple of new prompts.
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So far, audiences haven’t shown much enthusiasm for AI-generated films. Movies that have used AI-generated visuals have faced backlash from critics and moviegoers, and an AI-generated feature released in China earlier this year flopped hard at the box office. Gossip Goblin at least has a built-in audience, which helped make Markiplier’s Iron Lung a hit thanks in large part to his subscribers showing up at theaters. Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms also benefited from their creators’ fanbases, but went on to find much larger audiences beyond their YouTube followings.
But those guys actually made something. They hired real actors, shot with real cameras on real sets, employed real costume artists, prop teams, set dressers. Inde Navarrette became a breakout star from Obsession because audiences immediately were drawn to her performance. What’s the version of that for an AI film? How does the completely fabricated star of the film host “Saturday Night Live” if it’s a hit?
Actually, don’t answer that. Let’s just not even entertain the idea.