is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
As one of the cofounders behind Oculus Story Studio, Edward Saatchi knows how hard it can be to sell people on new tech that bills itself as revolutionary. Even though Story Studio snagged an Emmy for one of its three animated features, a general lack of public interest in VR movies led Meta to shutter Oculus Story Studio back in 2017. The VR era has come and gone, but Saatchi is confident that Showrunner, his new pivot to generative AI that just received an influx of cash from Amazon, can succeed.
Unlike a lot of other gen AI-centric entertainment outfits focused on deploying the technology in ways that audiences aren’t necessarily meant to see, Saatchi and his team at studio Fable developed Showrunner with the intention of people using the platform to generate content tailored to their specific desires. Currently, Showrunner lives on a Discord server where users can generate short animated videos by selecting characters and art styles from a list, and then writing prompts dictating what those characters say and how they interact with the environments around them.
After being told that you want to see Elon Musk and Sam Altman standing in an office break room and having a conversation about turning homelessness into a software as a service, Showrunner will generate a clip that mostly fits that description. Showrunner’s clips are all styled to match the aesthetics of one of the platform’s preset shows, like Exit Valley, a cartoon that appears to be a cross between Silicon Valley and Family Guy. The characters’ awkward, AI-generated voices are meant to sound like the real people they are based on. And they tend to be animated with an odd stiffness that makes it clear how much of Showrunner’s output is automated by machines rather than crafted by experienced human artists.
An Exit Valley clip featuring the likenesses of Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln.
For now, the service is free, but Fable intends to start charging subscribers somewhere between $10–$20 per month at some point in the future. And while Showrunner is currently limited to generating output based on its own catalog of original programming, other studios like Disney have reportedly expressed interest in licensing their IP to the platform.
When I spoke with Saatchi recently, he admitted to being a bit too high on his own supply during his time with Oculus and deeply humbled when that version of the company ultimately came to an end. That whiplash left him reconsidering what consumers really want out of their entertainment, and it convinced him that the answers lie in gen AI.
”You have no idea how arrogant we were right after Meta acquired Oculus, but I remember being in meetings across Hollywood to show off our ideas, and we were just like, ‘You guys are done; we’re taking over,’” Saatchi told me. “But our net impact on the industry was zero in the end, and our revenue from VR movies was probably $10.”
To Saatchi’s mind, the big issue with VR was that it kept users in a kind of limbo where they were expected to be both passive and interactive depending on which scenes they were watching. Alternating between those two modes of engagement, Saatchi told me, was part of Oculus’ plan to make its projects feel like crosses between traditional movies and video games. But Saatchi’s own disinterest in watching VR movies was a clear sign to him that the technology was a dead end he should move on from in favor of something more dynamic.
Saatchi’s interest in gen AI was actually sparked by a technical roadblock he and his collaborators ran into while developing a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2003 children’s book, Wolves in the Walls. In both tellings of the story, a young girl named Lucy lives in constant fear of the wolves living in the walls of her house, while her family insists that the creatures aren’t real. Saatchi and his team wanted their version of Lucy to be able to have fluent conversations with players / viewers as she guided them through the various rooms in her house. But the character was limited to reciting canned bits of dialogue rather than responding with context-specific speech.
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