AI-generated fake retro movie trailers are delightfully weird

What would a Mario movie have looked liked filmed in Super Panavision 70 in the 1950s. Or Terminator? Or Dune? An account on YouTube and Instagram is dedicated to exploring such vital questions by using AI video generation and Photoshop to create trailers for retro movies that were never made.

While the usual AI image generator artifacts are a clear giveaway that we’re not really watching footage from 1950s movies, the pieces are delightfully weird and hallucinatory. And they even manage to capture some of the charm of films from the era. In some cases, the glitches and imperfections add to the plausibility that in another past these could have been real movies.

From Star Wars to Shrek and The Chronicles of Narnia, the Abandoned Films channel has been uploading AI-generated visions of trailers for films that never were, all narrated by a plumby announcer voice. Some of the pieces bring to mind early stopmotion from the likes of KingKong, costume monsters like early Godzilla movies or even Thunderbirds-like supermarionation.

Characters don’t do much other than stare into the distance, and their appearance tends to morph before our eyes (although that adds an extra layer of creepiness with The Walking Dead). But the pieces show how fast AI video generation has developed.

“The fact that AI can generate a realistic 1950s Super Mario movie with just a few prompts is mind blowing. We are so not prepared for what AI can do,” one enthusiast gushed on X. The word “realistic” is perhaps being used a little liberally there, and the pieces aren’t movies: they’re brief mashups of random clips. But yes, they are kind of mind blowing when we consider that it was barely a year ago that AI generated that nightmare video of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

The pieces simultaneously show two things: how rapidly AI video has developed, but also how far it still has to go. They also show one of the things that generative AI is actually good for: rendering the ‘what if’ to get an idea of how something could look without having to go to the trouble of making a polished version. What AI video is not good at (at least not yet) is making an actual finished film, although one new streaming service has had a go anyway with its awful AI romance movie.