Benjamin Franklin and The Battle of Brooklyn — in AI?
That’s the premise of an intriguing, provocative new series that Darren Aronofsky is producing via his AI-focused venture Primordial Soup. Drawing on the tech of Google DeepMind, with which the company has a deal, Primordial Soup is dramatizing the scenes from some of the Revolutionary War period’s most pivotal moments and releasing them on Time’s YouTube channel.
Titled On This Day… 1776, the short-form series will see each episode focus on a different key moment from that crucial year. The fact-based narratives will rely on SAG voice actors and AI visuals — a “combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities,” the companies said in a statement. The hook? Each episode will drop on the 250th anniversary of its occurrence.
The debut episode centers on George Washington’s raising of the Continental Union Flag in Somerville, Mass., to boost the colonists’ morale; the second installment has Benjamin Franklin prodding a newly arrived Thomas Paine to give voice to common sense, leading to a pamphlet that was in a way the country’s first viral TikTok, changing broad sentiment in the colonies. Both episodes drop Thursday. Others will come every week throughout this sestercentennial year.
Thomas Paine in the AI-generated series On This Day… 1776.
Aronofsky is executive producing with his longtime writing partners Ari Handel and Lucas Sussman, the latter of whom is overseeing a team of writers, with a host of editors, artists, directors and designers also working on the project. Their goal is “reframing the Revolution not as a foregone conclusion but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it,” according to a statement from the companies. A trailer shows a number of historical figures attempting to rouse colonists as they slowly begin gaining confidence.
In focusing on the Colonial period, Aronofsky is drawing on an era that has often come to to define entertainment mediums: 1776 and Hamilton for the Broadway musical; John Adams and Turn for cable television. Now add AI viral-video content to that pile.
The Time connection to the DeepMind series adds another layer of intrigue, pairing America’s ultimate 20th-century documentarians of history with its quintessential 21st-century fabricator of technology. Salesforce is also backing the project, and its subsidiary Slack was integral to the production, principals said.
In a way the use of AI to reconstruct lavish historical scenes is a devilishly simple use case: rather than try to lean in to LLM’s surrealist abstractions to tell science-fiction and other genre stories, Aronofsky is deploying it for a bread-and-butter example of traditional cinema: the historical drama, allowing it to take the place of expensive and often prohibitive physical production.
The mother! director’s involvement in the Internet-based project ups the pedigree of online AI video creations, which until now has often involved embattled ads from major brands and promising but raw genre stories from upstart creators.
Aronofsky has been vocal about wanting to use AI for the kind of kinetic storytelling he is known for in his films — “soup not slop,” he has said. Google DeepMind has pacted with him to see what an artist of his caliber could do with it. An earlier project from the partnership, Eliza McNitt’s Ancestra, premiered at Tribeca last year.
Ben Bitonti, president of distribution partner Time Studios, noted in a statement that, “This project is a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like — not replacing craft, but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.” Of course, physical production already allows storytellers to do this, but AI advocates point out that given the time and budget burdens so many of these period productions would never have gotten made in the first place.
The episodes could also help answer a compelling question: could an AI model trained on a wide raft of historical materials capture the essence of a time and its personalities better than an individual flesh-and-blood reconstruction?
The use of AI in high-end storytelling accompanies another growing trend: the deployment of video tools for everyday people, as demonstrated by Disney’s recent deal with OpenAI that makes Sora available on Disney Plus. In so doing, Aronofsky is seeking to walk an AI line between Disney, which wants everyone to use it, and filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, who doesn’t even think high-end filmmakers should.
