Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker proposed using AI to insert cinemagoers into movies as a way to revive theater attendance. Shared at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August 2025, the concept involved scanning audience faces and randomly casting them in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark. OpenAI’s subsequent Sora 2 release and Disney’s character licensing deal have made the vision seem remarkably forward-thinking.
In August 2025, during an on-stage interview at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Charlie Brooker, the mind behind the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror, outlined an innovative yet provocative idea to combat declining cinema attendance. He suggested theaters scan the faces of entering patrons and employ AI to digitally insert them into the film being shown. 'So imagine if you went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark and you don’t know if you’re going to be Indiana Jones, or a melting Nazi,' Brooker quipped, highlighting the novelty of such personalization.
Just a month later, in September 2025, OpenAI unveiled Sora 2, an advanced video generation tool featuring a 'Cameos' function that lets users insert themselves into custom movie scenarios. The tool's outputs quickly went viral, echoing Brooker's foresight. Brooker himself noted the remix nature of AI content: 'It’s telling, isn’t it, that a lot of the AI-generated imagery you see is a remix of other things.'
Despite the technological leap, experts remain cautious about applying this to traditional cinema. Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media at King’s College London, pointed out that past interactive experiments, such as Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or the 2013 Dutch film APP, failed to gain traction. 'People just don’t go to the cinema for this stuff,' she said. Julian Hanich, a film studies professor at the University of Groningen, added that AI integration could undermine the escapist appeal of movies: 'The pleasure of watching a film is partly based on self-extending into a different world. If you are already part of that world through AI, that’s kind of contradictory.'
Ethical concerns around performer rights and privacy further complicate the idea, and exhibition executives declined to comment. However, studios are exploring AI personalization elsewhere. Disney recently licensed characters from Frozen and Toy Story for Sora 2, with top user-generated videos slated for Disney+. While not a direct cinema application, this move underscores shifting industry dynamics toward AI-driven content.
