Maybe the answer is... make more movies? Week in Review

Hi, and welcome to the Technically Creative Week in Review, where every Monday I look back at the biggest stories in AI, technology and the creative industries from the week just gone, and try to figure out what they actually mean for the week ahead.

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And this week, I’m going to do something slightly alarming.

I’m going to be optimistic.

Because a bunch of seemingly unrelated stories in filmmaking all seem to be pointing in the same direction. California is finally taking post-production incentives seriously. There’s suddenly bipartisan support for bringing more film and television production back to America. Tom Cruise thinks Paramount and Warner Bros. can make 30 movies a year. New production technology is making entirely different kinds of filmmaking economically possible. And AMC is getting into distribution.

And all of that has me asking a question that feels almost embarrassingly simple:

What if we just made more movies?

Not more $250 million movies that have to make a billion dollars to survive. More $2 million movies. More strange movies. More first-time filmmakers. More scripts coming out of drawers. More stages working. More jobs.

We’ve spent the last few years talking about an industry in contraction.

Maybe the more interesting possibility is that technology, incentives and new ways of reaching audiences could help us build one that expands again.

So, let’s get into it.