This Week in Gossip #23

Reese is in on AI, Quentin’s movie is shelved, Zendaya opens up, and Megalopolis is ready for the masses.

Reese is in on AI, Quentin’s movie is shelved, Zendaya opens up, and Megalopolis is ready for the masses. Here’s this week’s gossip roundup!

1. Reese Witherspoon Is All In on AI: “It’s Here To Stay.”

Reese Witherspoon attended PaleyFest last week to give a talk about the current state of Hollywood. The chat was moderated by Kara Swisher, a Silicon Valley journalist currently plugging a book about how she totally holds the industry to account while simultaneously schmoozing with every evil rich man in sight. While Witherspoon delved into a few topics, such as the dominance of streaming and whether or not the business is capable of creating true movie-stars anymore, it’s her thoughts on AI that seem to be garnering the most headlines.

When asked if AI was a tangible threat to the entertainment industry, Witherspoon said:

“It’s here to stay, so just get used to it. And I think AI is not coming for your job; people who know how to use AI are coming for your job. So learn about it. It should be a tool upon which we lay our own creativity, our own humanity and our own ethics. That’s a whole conversation — for women and people of color and people who are othered sometimes in those developmental spaces really need to get in there… let’s not be scared of it, let’s dive in.”

I must admit that I’m pretty cynical these days when it comes to Witherspoon. She’s a remarkably efficient businesswoman who turned her Hello Sunshine brand into a major power player in a still male-dominated field. Her book club savvily managed to simultaneously promote tons of new books (usually written by women) and build up an audience for the film they’d make from it. Look at the massive success of Where the Crawdads Sing, a Witherspoon book club favourite that her company then optioned into a successful feature. I think Reese is excellent at making her business seem as female-centred as possible, although my anti-capitalist brain always flinches when her work is described as a feminist endeavour.

So, Witherspoon talking about AI as a grand inevitability we should all prep for by getting good at using it feels like a wrong-headed way to view the issue, one more concerned with making money than protecting the industry. For her to then push women and people of colour to “dive in”  is a bit too girlbossy for me. The threat of AI is very real, as two whole strikes last year proved. Witherspoon will be fine but the below-the-line workers who make up the vast majority of the film and TV worlds are the ones at risk. AI has its uses but the big powers in entertainment have made it clear that they’re most concerned with eliminating as many jobs as possible with it.

I do wonder how long it’ll be before we see a fluffy Hello Sunshine AI initiative. Remember when Witherspoon was all in on NFTs and positioning them as a great feminist cause? She shut up about that very quickly when the bottom fell out of the market and tons of regular people lost their life savings on ugly JPEGs of monkeys. Witherspoon is extremely good at making money out of things where everyone else loses big time (hello, Quibi.) Her enthusiasm about AI only further drives home to me the reality of these “disruptive” markets: they enrich the mega-wealthy and bleed everyone else dry.

2. Zendaya Gets Candid About Being the Breadwinner as a Child Actress

Challengers is finally arriving in theatres following a months’ long strike-related delay. That means it’s the season of Zendaya and her method dressing. She’s working every red carpet with the thematic beauty and effortless charisma we’ve come to expect from her. This latest film, a romantic drama set in the tennis world directed by Luca Guadagnino, is set to send her stardom to the next level. The reviews have heralded it as her best performance yet and a sign that she is a true movie star. Bring it on.