TBPN

Kimi K3 Reactions, The Odyssey Hits $264M in Debut, Netflix Embraces AI | Diet TBPN

31 min
Jul 20, 20268 days ago
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Summary

The episode covers the release of Moonshot's Kimi K3 open-source AI model and its geopolitical implications for the US-China AI race, including debates around compute smuggling, distillation attacks, and cybersecurity risks. The hosts also discuss The Odyssey's strong $264M global opening weekend and Christopher Nolan's emergence as a director-driven franchise. Netflix's disclosure of using generative AI in approximately 300 productions rounds out the episode.

Insights
  • Open-source AI models from China are closing the gap with US frontier closed models faster than many predicted, invalidating the thesis that open source would fall behind permanently.
  • The geopolitical risk of powerful open-weight AI is twofold: it democratizes offensive cyber capabilities for bad actors while also being effectively ungovernable by any single nation-state.
  • Director-driven filmmaking is emerging as a viable alternative to IP franchise dominance, with 53% of Odyssey attendees citing Nolan as their primary reason for attending.
  • Netflix's disclosure of AI use in ~300 productions signals that generative AI is now a mainstream production tool in Hollywood, concentrated in post-production workflows.
  • The global compute supply constraint remains the binding factor in AI development — not model architecture or talent — with land, permits, electricity, chips, and cooling all bottlenecked simultaneously.
Trends
Chinese open-source AI models are rapidly closing the performance gap with US frontier closed models, sustaining a persistent 3-9 month lag rather than falling behind.Open-weight AI models are becoming a geopolitical tool, with open sourcing serving both commercial (Red Hat-style monetization) and strategic (export-driven) purposes.Cybersecurity threat landscape is escalating as powerful open-weight models enable highly personalized, reasoning-capable phishing and social engineering attacks.Director-as-franchise is replacing IP-as-franchise in Hollywood, with studios signing multi-picture deals with individual filmmakers rather than acquiring IP libraries.Generative AI adoption in film and TV production is scaling rapidly, moving from experimental to standard workflow integration across hundreds of titles.Global compute infrastructure remains severely supply-constrained, benefiting hyperscalers and large-cap tech companies with non-AI cash flows to fund capex.The accelerationist vs. decelerationist debate is fracturing around open-weight models, with open-weight AI seen as inherently ungovernable and potentially deterring frontier capex investment.US export controls on chips may be inadvertently accelerating Chinese open-source AI strategy by limiting Chinese labs' ability to monetize closed inference at scale.Audience taste in entertainment is shifting generationally, with Gen Z favoring authentic filmmaker voices over franchise sequels and CGI-heavy blockbusters.AI safety concerns are being stress-tested by open-weight frontier models, raising questions about whether safety norms can be enforced without centralized model control.
Topics
Companies
Moonshot AI
Released Kimi K3, a powerful open-source AI model that sparked US-China AI cold war debate.
Netflix
Disclosed using generative AI in ~300 productions in 2026, primarily in post-production workflows.
OpenAI
Referenced as a US frontier lab whose closed models are being benchmarked against Kimi K3.
Anthropic
Mentioned as a frontier lab known for prioritizing code capabilities in model development.
Nvidia
Kimi K3's architecture and large parameter count are argued to be net positive for Nvidia GPU demand.
Microsoft
Nicholas Bustamante at Microsoft cited as making a bull case for compute-constrained AI infrastructure.
Palo Alto Networks
CEO Nikesh cited as having prepared cybersecurity defenses ahead of open-weight AI proliferation.
CrowdStrike
CEO George cited as aware of and preparing for open-weight AI cybersecurity threats.
Comcast
Parent company of Universal Pictures, which backed The Odyssey's $250M production budget.
Universal Pictures
Studio behind The Odyssey, which opened to $264M globally in its debut weekend.
Google
Mentioned in context of TPU export restrictions making Chinese access to Google TPUs very difficult.
IBM
Acquired Red Hat for ~$30B; cited as analogy for open-source AI monetization models.
Red Hat
Used as a business model analogy for how open-source AI can generate revenue through hosted services.
Vercel
CEO Guillermo mentioned testing Kimi K3 and finding it top-tier, particularly for front-end work.
Warner Brothers
Cited as signing filmmaker-first deals, including Ryan Coogler and Zach Krieger, reflecting new studio strategy.
Sony Pictures
Signed Weapons director Zach Krieger for a Resident Evil adaptation as part of filmmaker deal trend.
Disney
Referenced as contrast to director-driven model, owning Marvel IP without key-man risk.
CAA
CEO Byron Lord quoted on generational shift toward individual filmmaker voices in Hollywood.
People
Dean Ball
Policy commentator who debated Kimi K3 implications, arguing open-weight models are inherently decelerationist.
David Sacks
Engaged in public debate on the timeline about Kimi K3 and US-China AI competition implications.
Emil Michael
Participated in public debate with David Sacks on the implications of Kimi K3's release.
Nicholas Bustamante
Cited making the bull case that global compute is severely supply-constrained and demand is accelerating.
Guillermo Rauch
Tested Kimi K3 and noted it is top-tier for front-end development work.
Nikesh Arora
Previously interviewed on the show; cited as having prepared cybersecurity defenses for open-weight AI era.
George Kurtz
Previously interviewed; cited as aware of and preparing for open-weight AI cybersecurity threats.
Christopher Nolan
Director of The Odyssey; discussed as a franchise-level filmmaker whose brand drove 53% of ticket purchases.
Ted Sarandos
Cited Netflix's use of AI in 300 productions and highlighted 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage in one docuseries.
Lucas Shaw
Cited as source for The Odyssey's $264M opening weekend box office figures and budget details.
Byron Lord
Quoted on the generational shift toward individual filmmaker voices replacing franchise dominance in Hollywood.
Ryan Coogler
Cited as example of director-driven deal trend; Warner Bros gave him rights to make original horror film Sinners.
Greta Gerwig
Used her post-Barbie clout to convince Netflix to greenlight a Chronicles of Narnia adaptation.
Yann LeCun
Referenced as a benchmark for skepticism about AGI; Dean Ball says CCP shares LeCun's view of AI limits.
Quotes
"Open source AI just feels punk rock to me. It feels like Napster. As a kid, the idea of just liberating all the information."
Host
"Open weight models are inherently decelerationist. I'm continually surprised to see the so-called accelerationists so excited about open weight models."
Dean Ball
"Guys, the world is so compute constrained. I honestly don't understand how anyone thinks otherwise. Almost nobody is seriously using AI today and we're already hitting capacity."
Nicholas Bustamante
"53% of Odyssey attendees said that the director was their number one reason for attending. Not the actor, not the fact that they loved the book."
Host
"Things have generally generationally changed and individual singular voices are taking advantage."
Byron Lord
Full Transcript
4 Speakers
Speaker A

It's Monday and there's a lot of news. The big stuff. Kimmy K3 dropped. But first we should recap the weekend. How was your weekend?

0:01

Speaker B

The elephant in the room. That I'm wearing a suit.

0:09

Speaker A

Yes, the elephant in the. Did somebody say that? The elephant in the room.

0:11

Speaker C

Georgie.

0:15

Speaker A

Suit's feeling good. He's refreshed.

0:15

Speaker B

Yeah, refreshed. I. Yeah, was in the elephant to the old country. Yes, yes, exactly. Really fun time. Glad to be back. Very, very refreshed.

0:17

Speaker A

Very fun. I was at a Caruso property this weekend and I gotta say, being there, being at the Miramar Rosewood, I can never vote for him for public office ever again.

0:31

Speaker B

Why? Because you want him to develop more properties like that?

0:43

Speaker A

Yeah, I want him laser focused on resorts and malls.

0:45

Speaker B

It doesn't really hold up because the whole point was that there was some possibility that he could make greater Los Angeles something like his incredible property.

0:48

Speaker A

You gotta get a Rosewood in every city in America.

0:58

Speaker B

Maybe I'll take private of the city of Los Angeles, turn it potential into

1:02

Speaker A

a Caruso project potentially. But it was a good weekend. Glad to be back. The timeline was burning up over the weekend over the AI Cold war that's breaking out between the US Frontier Labs and Chinese open source. There's been a whole bunch of new Chinese open source models that have dropped with some promising benchmarks. The latest one that everyone is up in arms about is moonshots Kimi K3. It was unveiled last Thursday. Now they aren't actually.

1:06

Speaker B

I kept opening X and thinking, looking, scrolling a few times, thinking, oh, I'm happy for you, or sorry that happened. I put my phone away. I feel like I miss a lot.

1:37

Speaker A

Yeah, I mean, it's gated behind an app right now. The waits are not actually open just yet. That should happen Monday if things go to plan. But of course, there's a lot going back and forth with the administration. People are weighing every possible consequence of this. It's the classic, it's over, we're back. Is this good for semiconductors? Is this bad for semiconductors? Is this Jevons Paradox? Is it the counterexample of Jevons Paradox? It's all very interesting debates and everyone's coming out with their own opinion. Dean Ball was going back and forth with two people. David Sacks and also Emil Michael were duking it out on the timeline, fighting it out, back and forth, but, you know, decent takes on both sides, lots to chew through. The headlines for Kimmy are impressive, but not wildly surprising based on the current trend. Lines in model Progress but it does seem to invalidate the thesis that open source would start falling behind, which was something that was start. There was that chart from the government I believe that showed closed model progress was, you know, accelerating on this particular exponential and open models were falling behind. This seems like a proper catch up, something that was predicted from, you know, many lab leaders that you know, the six month gap, three month gap, nine month gap. It will remain just that gap for the foreseeable future. But there are of course a bunch of other nuances here in the most above board scenario sort of here's what happened. Like the Moonshot team, it's just a bunch of highly talented AI researchers who marshaled enough compute to release a great model. Open sourcing Kimi is a great way to grab attention, attract talent, drive demand for hosted API services that are more turnkey eventually there's a very reasonable business model behind open sourcing. Red Hat Linux of course is an open source company owned by IBM. Now I think the acquisition price was in the $30 billion range and at any point you could just say I'm just doing Red Hat on my own. But a lot of companies pay for consultant hosted and all sorts of different services around the open source piece of software. That's sort of like the bull case, like you know, everything's going well. The more skeptical folks on the timeline are pointing to ideas such as maybe the compute was smuggled into China against chip controls. Maybe the data was exfiltrated From Frontier Lab APIs routed through wrapper companies. Maybe this is a distillation attack. The open source strategy is a deliberate attempt to destroy American companies. It's geopolitical warfare. It's the AI cold war and there might even be spies inside companies stealing IP directly. And so that's sort of like the bad version. The reality is probably a mix of both. But we'll know more over time and we'll hear more statements from the labs and from all sorts of different participants to understand people are going back and forth on if you ask Kimi its name, will it just say it's Claude or GPT? And there were some examples of people doing that. Seemed like it was photoshopped. Seemed like that also seems like the easiest thing to fix. Possibly it's just put it in the prompt, put in the fine tuning, never find and replace. Seems pretty easy.

1:51

Speaker B

You're showing it in the reasoning trace.

5:07

Speaker A

Yeah, but I don't know. All these things are hard to assess over time. It takes time to actually work through what's real, what's fake. What's a hallucination? You know, they all, they all make mistakes from time to time. But there are bigger questions about AI safety in a world of powerful open source AI. I haven't seen a ton of takes from this crowd, but you have to imagine that they aren't happy about it. Maybe the Stop AI protests will head over to Beijing next and beat down the doors of Moonshot directly. But it is an odd thing because even if you're not worried about the fast takeoff, you know, grey goo paperclip monster from a cybersecurity perspective, like things are going to get more complex. There's reasonable solutions to all of this, but it is a more powerful tool in the hackers or the act hackers tool chest. Fortunately, defenders have had roughly six months of frontier exclusivity with GPT Cyber and Mythos for a while. And so there's been a lot of preparation. We've talked to Nikesh at Palo Alto Networks and George at CrowdStrike about this. Like they have been aware that this is coming for a while and so a lot of systems have been patched. But at the same time you can just imagine now anyone who's a hacker can spin up a very, very intelligent model and start sending a bunch of spam emails or spam text messages that stop seeming so AI. And they're not as clockable because it's just another level of intelligence and it can do reasoning traces and research. And so you know, the, the spammer or the phishing attack can actually know what insurance you have and then pose as your insurance agent and actually know a little bit about your insurance agent instead of just sort of sending you a generic spam text. Your things are going to get more customized, more personalizable. Of course there will be more advanced defense layers. But the war is continuing. There really is no debating that open source is just cool. Like open source AI. It just feels punk rock to me. It feels like Napster, like as a kid, the idea of just like liberating all the information.

5:09

Speaker B

Yeah, it's culturally aligned to the Internet itself.

7:14

Speaker A

Yeah, it's just a cool thing. Even though you do have to grapple with all the different problems that come from it downstream. Like the, there's something just deeply satisfying about the idea of like a solar powered server rack serving you up unstoppable intelligence, which is another good name for a neolab, you know, a country of geniuses.

7:17

Speaker B

Yeah. In some ways, to me it feels like aligned to America's ideals.

7:37

Speaker A

Oh yeah.

7:42

Speaker B

It's like as Though, like, it feels like, like very empowering.

7:42

Speaker A

It's total second amendment. Yeah, it's like totally second amendment.

7:46

Speaker B

Exactly. Yeah.

7:48

Speaker A

It's like I should be able to go off grid and have, you know, not a country of geniuses in a data center controlled by a corporation, but just like my own genius who's riding with me no matter what in my basement, you know, and it's like, even if you're not thinking like nefarious, it's like this. It's this idea that, you know, I like to have a copy of a movie in case, like, the grid goes down. You know, the more like, you know, apocalyptic thinking. This is a very general thing that I think a lot of people align to, especially if they're at all crypto native. It's like, why do you want Bitcoin? Well, it's unstoppable money. The government can't take it from you. In certain scenarios, of course, like, there's a bunch of ways that they can. Of course, like anything else. But there is just something very, very attractive about bitcoin having just a machine with all of human knowledge on it. It's like a. It's like the, you know, every house used to have the full Encyclopedia Britannica. You could just look up anything, and now you have the LLM that can solve any math problem for you. But, you know, the US Government is going back and forth on this issue how to handle the situation. And I imagine we'll see developments this week. The Kimi K3 weights drop next Monday. And so this is the week where if the government wants to do something one way or another, they have the opportunity to do that. There were some back and forth on, like, would there be a direct ban, a hard ban, a soft ban, Maybe just some, like, messaging around, hey, like, please be a patriot, don't use this foreign product. You know, there's all sorts of different ways, like the original, like buy made in America. Buy American. That's just marketing. But it does have some effect. It's not enough to make GoPro a $10 billion company, but it is enough to, you know, cause a little bit of motion in the, in the, in the economy.

7:49

Speaker B

One thing that was notable over the weekend, Kimmy on X said that. Kimmy K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it. Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity to protect the experience of existing subscribers. We're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members, we're adding capacity as fast as we can and we will reopen new subscription spots and batches. So Kimi and the world more broadly are quite supply constrained and showing that the other dimension of this whole geopolitical battle is around the hardware side.

9:39

Speaker A

I mean, in general, I think my, my takeaway was. And Tyler, I'd be interested to hear how you process this, but I just don't see this as a black pill. Even if it's like a deep seek moment and the markets sort of bounce around for a little bit, it seems like there's still a lot of demand for frontier intelligence, a lot of demand for near frontier intelligence, a lot of demand for really cheap older models that have been baked down to basically intelligence too cheap to meter. And we are going to be in this process of go and find an actual use for something and then bake it down to be really, really cheap so that it can be offered.

10:18

Speaker B

Yeah. And in so many moments over the last two years, there's been a company that's come out, maybe they've raised some money, you maybe forget about them for like six months and then they pop up. And it turns out even though they're the number 10 company in their category, they're still growing faster than almost any company that existed like six years ago.

10:54

Speaker A

Yeah. And a lot of it goes down to deployment too. There's like certain companies, if they're in consumer, like they just have a really good go to market motion. Like they're just able to get customers to subscribe or use their product or if they're in enterprise, like they just have a great like forward deployed motion to actually do the change necessary as opposed to just like here's an API law firm, like they could have done that. And yet you have legal AI companies that have done a great job of coming in and actually creating a product that works within the confines of the, the broader organization. What are your Kimmy K3 reactions, Tyler?

11:18

Speaker D

Yeah, I mean I think it was definitely like a surprise, an update like this is extremely good model. The idea that open source is falling behind seems like very much.

11:53

Speaker A

We sort of got a preview with GLM 5.2.

12:01

Speaker D

Yes.

12:03

Speaker A

Like people were already saying like, oh, GLM to 5.2, sort of catching up.

12:03

Speaker D

Yes. But even that, that was closer to maybe a year, maybe a little less than a year behind. This seems like much closer. But I think I broadly agree, like, okay, there's this great open source model and now we have, okay, the Jacobian conjecture, like this kind of storied math problem is proven. And so yeah, there's just going to be a lot more use everywhere. I expect these kinds of models to be used everywhere.

12:07

Speaker A

It seems like a lot of the hype is around specifically the parameters, the size of the model, the way it was trained it'll be. And then also it did very well in the front end arena, which was interesting because that's. I mean it jumped ahead of everything there and that feels like a particular. Like it'll be interesting to see because you see more and more taste going into these models. Like OpenAI is really big into the math stuff and Anthropic was really big on code early and there's all these different like you can just tell that like oh, this lab cares about chess now and now the model's good at chess or the model got better at writing because they took the time to spend a month sprinting on that. And it'll be interesting to see where did they sprint if anywhere, where didn't they sprint. And it's sort of lagging and then what harness it works best with how important is the harness relative to everything else. But will be interesting to continue following semianalysis said similar to the panic over deep seq R1 Some uneducated people think Kimmy K3's use of linear attention KDA is bad for Nvidia HBM DRAM and networking because it has relatively lower KV cache requirements. The opposite is true and they'll explain Kimik 3 is actually quite positive for Nvidia as large model inference is where the NVL 72 shines. Because K3 has more than 2.8 trillion parameters, it requires a large scale up domain to store its weights. Secondly, although Kimi Delta attention has up to 10x lower networking requirements for KV cache transfers, its large weights require even more network bandwidth to implement an optimization called wide EP which spreads weights across different GPUs. Is China getting TPUs? Those have to be chip export restricted and probably more difficult to get into the country because there's less resellers and in order to set up a TPU based data center you probably have to work very closely with Google. Whereas Nvidia GPUs are sort of going to like all sorts of small NEO clouds and there's a lot of places where seven steps down the chain it can wind up in a suitcase with a hairdryer removing a label or something like that.

12:32

Speaker B

Well, it's not even that you can imagine if you were a Chinese lab and you wanted to get access to compute There would be a number of ways to set up U.S. entities that then basically get compute through a variety of different sources here in the US and you're just getting it remotely.

14:35

Speaker A

Nicholas Bustamante at Microsoft who is working on AI for knowledge workers says, guys, the world is so compute constrained. I honestly don't understand how anyone thinks otherwise. Almost nobody is seriously using AI today and we're already hitting capacity. Everything is a bottleneck. Land for data centers, permits electricity grid connections, chips, construction, cooling. Demand is growing far faster than supply and expanding supply is insanely expensive. In this game, the best position companies are the ones with massive net income from non AI products. They can fund hundreds of billions in capex. He's given a little bit of a bull case for Microsoft and his billions

14:55

Speaker B

of Guillermo over at Vercel says Kimmy tested it. What's that?

15:34

Speaker A

Yeah, that's good to hear.

15:40

Speaker B

Yeah, Kimmy K3 is top tier at cybersecurity. That will, that will be interesting as the. As basically the weights are released, do we see an uptick in tax?

15:41

Speaker A

And it's also sort of a refutation of like the. It's just distilled because the models that you would be distilling from are pretty severely nerfed on cybersecurity, at least in theory. And so it's like you would need to distill on the non. The non nerfed model, which is probably way harder because those are much more restricted. And so it does feel like there's a little bit of a refutation of the idea that these are purely distilled.

15:54

Speaker B

SOL is a leap ahead in cyber capability at a significantly higher cost, but quite remarkable still. Fable refuses everything. We couldn't get it to complete the run at all. What is interesting is that SOL in comparison was much more open to helping with defensive cyber hardening. TLDR frontier open weight cyber capability ability is here. This was good high year. Harry says Rip the Bear case July 16 to July 19 perfectly coinciding with my trip. Which, which is. Which is nice.

16:24

Speaker A

Dean Ball was going back and forth, oh, some deleted posts now his observations were getting taken to task going back and forth. He says it's a very good model. I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that in agentic coding sessions. It seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1, 2026 in my fairly limited use. It also seems very token hungry. Dean says I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good giving potential risks. Now it seems like that is very much like from the top they are pro open source right now. Dean says to be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight but. But I'm surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason is that they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness, lack of AGI pilledness. The CCP is very yann Lecuni in its view of AI. The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference making China's open weight strategy an unintended byproduct of U.S. export controls. That's interesting. And the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports for the companies as opposed to the government. The decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind and they know that very few people would pay for sub frontier models from China. Yeah, you have to imagine that it like the idea of sending I mean people are having discussion over like should you send your corporate data to an American frontier lab. Imagine that that same level of should we upload our entire code base to the moonshot API because we've gone all in on Chinese closed source which seems like that's a very very hard sell. So there is a world where there's like no money to be made in America. I don't know, maybe there's some American businesses that would just be like yeah, I'm cool with it. Like take my, take everything, take all my ip. I'm antifragile. I can't be. You can't clone me so and I have no IP so just upload it all.

16:54

Speaker B

I mean if you're a local plumbing company. Yeah, maybe probably in a good spot.

18:52

Speaker A

Lean in maybe, maybe. This is a pretty hot take. Dean says open weight models are inherently decelerationist and Tyler and I were debating this before the show. He said I'm continually surprised to see the so called accelerationists so excited about open weight models. I suspect the reason is that they know open weight models are effectively ungovernable. That's correct. And they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy. It reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the Hill people in the art of not being governed. Still in the end open weight models deter further AI capex and this is the debate that we were having was like how capex intensive are these frontier training runs because moonshots raised I think a billion Dollars recently. And it just feels like even the latest labs, there's a lot of cost, a lot of researchers and, and they do a lot of experiments. But the core run, we might not be talking about 50 billion yet. Maybe in the future you need to accrue towards that. And maybe people wouldn't fund it if they're like, oh, you're only going to be able to monetize this for like three months because you're going to get distilled so fast or you're going to get copied so fast. That is tricky. Like, it is nicer when you have a monopoly or oligopoly for some period of time to actually earn profits off of what you invested against.

18:57

Speaker B

Well, if anyone listening to this is over at Kimmy or Moonshot.

20:21

Speaker A

Come on the show.

20:26

Speaker B

No, don't come on the show. Just feel free to let us know how you made it. Yeah, maybe feel free to leak the secret sauce on the show.

20:27

Speaker A

Come on the show.

20:37

Speaker B

On the show. Yeah. If you're so open, why not? The Odyssey is up to 264 million. Biggest selling animated opening of the year and until spider man in two weeks, according to Lucas Shaw over at Bloomberg, $375 million.

20:37

Speaker A

Budget production was $250 million. They recouped that immediately. 125 million in global marketing, apparently, and looks like a big financial win. But very much priced in like the base case here. The film will make a little bit over a billion dollars. The cash flow to Universal and Comcast, who are the studio behind this, you're looking at $250 million in pre tax lifetime profit. That's 0.2% of Comcast's market value. So it's not like this crazy thing for the corporate entity, but it is exciting for the film and it's exciting for Christopher Nolan, who's in the Journal today in the business and finance section, because Nolan's the Odyssey shows directors are franchises. Now. They have an interesting statistic in here. 53% of Odyssey attendees said that the director was their number one reason for attending. Not the actor, not the fact that they loved the book and they were waiting for the IP to get adapted. Not that it's a, you know, oh, they like sword and sandals. They were looking, or that it was imax. They wanted a Nolan film. And, and that's, I mean, everyone knows this intuitively from talking to everyone. Everyone's like, I want to see the next Nolan film. But it's just interesting that there has been this huge shift towards franchises built around particular intellectual Property, verticals, Marvel, Star Wars, Disney stuff, Pixar and whatnot. But now people are saying, I'm just going to ride with this director and whatever he does. And he can take me to the past, he can take me to the future. Wherever he goes, I'm riding with Nolan.

20:55

Speaker B

I had a funny run in with Christopher Nolan. I was walking on the beach and Christopher Nolan was walking in front of me. Yeah, I'm not hitting any sound effects, to be clear. And he's walking with his dog. I don't know who he is or what he looks like. Someone else who I'm with. Someone else says, that's Christopher Nolan. I said, who? And then, and then it came to me. But then this dog ran up behind us. He was walking his dog. Another dog joins and is like really messing with his dog. And so I had to be like, I just had to say, hey, man, it's not my dog. Because it seemed, it seemed like my dog was off the beat. I was being framed for having a poorly trained dog that was harassing his dog. But he was pretty unbothered. Let's head over to this picture from Gauthier. He had the best seat in the house.

22:37

Speaker A

This is a real photo or do you think this is, like, take a photo and then put it in AI and say, like, make it even more distorted? Because this is what it looks like to be truly in the front row of an IMAX showing. People were really crazy about, like, the, The IMAX looked way better. I think some folks on the team saw the film once, twice, three times. Who saw it in imax? Okay, we got some IMAX chats.

23:38

Speaker B

I haven't seen it yet.

24:03

Speaker A

Mike's seen it. Give us the review. You liked it. How many thumbs up out of 10? What do you got for me? Tyler, you can chime in too. What do you think?

24:04

Speaker B

It was fantastic.

24:12

Speaker A

It was fantastic.

24:13

Speaker B

Were you taking notes the whole time? Did you have a notebook?

24:14

Speaker C

Mentally? Mentally, no, but it's great. It's an amazing accomplishment.

24:18

Speaker A

Like shoot the next movie in imax, dude.

24:23

Speaker C

I mean, it's one of the best looking films, I think, ever. I mean, the quality is just like unmatched.

24:25

Speaker A

You did 70 millimeter.

24:31

Speaker C

70 mil IMAX. It's, it's, it's incredible.

24:32

Speaker A

It's incredible.

24:36

Speaker B

How many times do you think. How many times do you think you'll see it in theaters?

24:37

Speaker C

Well, I mean, I'm already scheduled for four total.

24:41

Speaker A

Four total. That's crazy. We'll see how that goes.

24:44

Speaker D

Yeah, I was slumming it in Normal theaters. I don't want to spoil it in case you haven't read it yet.

24:47

Speaker A

Okay. Yeah.

24:51

Speaker B

Thank you.

24:52

Speaker A

Yeah.

24:53

Speaker D

Just. Yeah. But I think I'm really excited to

24:53

Speaker A

find out if he gets home.

24:56

Speaker D

Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. My take, I posted it was missing some. Some hijinks and some gas. There were a few scenes missing from the actual poem that I would like to see, but I think. Wait, wait.

24:57

Speaker A

Are there hijinks in the poem that you did that didn't make it in?

25:06

Speaker D

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

25:09

Speaker A

It was low on hijinks.

25:11

Speaker D

We should do an episode on imax.

25:12

Speaker A

Oh, yeah, we got to film this show in imax. That'd be awesome. How would you rank it in the Nolan Cannon? Top five? Top two. What are we doing?

25:14

Speaker D

He's not going to beat the Dark Knight. Yeah, Dark Knight.

25:24

Speaker A

Dark Knight's better. Interception, Inception, Tenet, obviously I loved it.

25:26

Speaker C

I think it says a lot about the filmmaker. If. If this film doesn't make his top three for some. That says a lot about. Or top five just with like his filmography.

25:32

Speaker A

Top five right now. Top five Nolan films.

25:41

Speaker C

Go Inception, Dark Knight, Interstellar, Oppenheimer. Odyssey's gotta be up there.

25:43

Speaker A

Okay, Odyssey's in the top five. There you go. Well, hopefully Jordy can take a look at it. I think we'll wait.

25:48

Speaker B

Yeah, we'll wait till I can chime in to solidify that top five.

25:55

Speaker A

Every Hollywood studio wants its own Christopher Nolan. And I'm interested to know how locked in is he with Comcast, particularly like Universal. It feels like it's this huge asset, but it's wildly different than, you know, when you're Disney and you just own Marvel and there's absolutely no key man risk. But it's clearly worked out very well. The Odyssey was written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It opened to an estimated 600 $264 million worldwide domestically. Its 124 million debut was the third biggest for any film this year. So it's not that huge. It didn't beat Toy Story 5, didn't beat Super Mario Galaxy, but it does feel like it'll have a longer run of people seeing it multiple times times paying more for imax. And it is just a breakout for an R rated historical movie. That's a niche that typically doesn't put up massive numbers like a Toy Story, for example. The opening was higher than many 2026 releases based on current, more current intellectual properties. It smoked Star wars, the Mandalorian and Grogu smoked Supergirl. And it also beat Scream 7. Nolan's brand power and commercial track record got Comcast, Universal Pictures and to say yes to a roughly $250 million R rated adaptation of an ancient Greek poem shot across Europe with largely practical visual effects, including a 35 foot tall Trojan horse. According to data from Ren Track, 53% of the Odyssey attendees said the director was the number one reason for attending. It's not often you see that, said Universal President Domestic Distribution Chris Nolan has earned the audience's trust and respect, and that's completely true. In the late 2000s and 2010, franchises dominated the movie industry. Studios hired directors who could pump out sequels, spinoffs and remakes as efficiently as possible. Nolan was the most successful and prolific among a tiny number of filmmakers who still called their own shots. Along with the hugely successful Dark Knight trilogy, he made his original hit movies like Inception and Interstellar. But Marvel, Fast and Furious and Transformers have all stumbled at the box office recently as audiences have grown tired of them. Gen Z in particular appears skeptical of the industry's reliance on aging brands and technology driven filmmaking. They're more drawn to stories told by an authentic, recognizable filmmaker with a point of view, says the Wall Street Journal. Like Curry Barker, director of surprise horror blockbuster Obsession, that film was one of the several new to the big screen director driven hits this year, including Project Hail Mary and Backrooms. In response, studios that used to obsess over franchise management are devoting more energy to signing the most promising filmmakers. So you can imagine a 10 movie deal. I think Curry Barker already has a multiple movie deal just on the back of backrooms, even though with his first film, studios are lost as far as knowing what works and what doesn't, said Byron Lord, CEO of CIA. Things have generally generationally changed and individual singular voices are taking advantage. Warner Brothers gave Black Panther and Creed director Ryan Coogler an unusually generous deal to the rights to make his own original horror movie Sinners, which became a hit last year. Weapons director Zach Krieger is helming an adaptation of the video game Resident Evil for Sony Pictures this fall and was part of a recent multimillion dollar deal Warner made for a new horror property. Bar Re director Greta Gerwig used her clout to convince Netflix to make her adaptation of the Chronicles of Narnia interesting. They're rebooting that.

26:00

Speaker B

Netflix disclosed it has used generative AI in about 300 different productions this year already.

29:41

Speaker A

People are gonna love this.

29:48

Speaker B

They wrote across the production life cycle from concept and pre visualization through post gen AI utilization by our creative partners is scaling quickly in 2026 gen AI workflows have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration of work in post production. We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods.

29:49

Speaker A

One of the clearest examples came from the American Experiment, a docu series about the American Revolution. CO CEO Ted Sarando said the series included 17 minutes of AI enhanced footage that explained the scale of the project and that expanded the scale of the project and would not have been financially feasible using traditional production methods. The company insists that AI is not being introduced to replace writers, directors, actors or other creative professionals. Instead, Netflix is positioning the technology as the next evolution of filmmaking software, allowing productions to create shots and sequences that would previously have been impossible or overly expensive. Very cool.

30:13

Speaker C

I don't know.

30:53

Speaker B

That is our show today folks.

30:53

Speaker A

Thank you for tuning in.

30:55

Speaker B

It's an honor to be back here in the Ultradome. It's fantastic with you all.

30:56

Speaker A

We'll see you tomorrow at 11am Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpi.com and we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

31:00