Martin Scorsese, the 83-year-old director who once called Marvel movies "not cinema," is now an adviser and partner at an AI image company. And the people who actually make his movies are not happy about it.
Last week, Black Forest Labs, the startup behind the FLUX image models, announced Scorsese's involvement alongside a $300 million Series B that valued the company at $2.35 billion. CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz is also an angel investor, giving BFL a fairly direct line into Hollywood.
Scorsese's pitch is that AI is a storyboarding tool. In a promotional video, he said he's been drawing his own storyboards for 60 years to communicate what's in his head to his cast and crew. Using the famous Goodfellas Copacabana Steadicam shot as an example, he said an AI tool could have saved production time and reduced "wear and tear on the crew." That part is reasonable enough. Then he said the idea would be to "make a film in your private room, in a way, and you create the picture" before handing it off to a crew of 50 or 100 people.
That's the line the Art Directors Guild caught.
On June 9, the ADG (IATSE Local 800) put out a formal statement opening with "Mr. Scorsese, The Business is not in flux." The pun on FLUX, BFL's flagship model, was not subtle. The union accused Scorsese of turning his back on the human artists who built his films, and argued that generative AI is only capable of producing this kind of "cinematic intelligence" by ingesting copyrighted work that was almost certainly scraped from the internet without consent or compensation.
The fight didn't stay inside one union, and the rest of Hollywood split roughly along generational lines:
- Demi Moore, speaking at Cannes, said "fighting A.I. is a battle that we will lose," so working with it is the more useful path to take.
- Kane Parsons, the 23-year-old director of A24's "Backrooms," told Variety that using AI in filmmaking "defeats the purpose."
The timing is loud. SAG-AFTRA ratified its new contract six days after Scorsese's announcement, with 89.3% voting in favor of tightened AI protections. The IATSE Basic Agreement already covers AI work through 2028. Both unions spent the last contract cycle fighting to keep AI from quietly replacing labor, and Scorsese's endorsement landed right in the middle of all of it.
The thing that makes this sting isn't that Scorsese is using AI. Half of Hollywood already is, quietly. The thing that stings is that the guy who spent the last decade defending cinema as a craft is now in promotional videos for an AI company backed by Michael Ovitz. The ADG's real argument isn't that AI storyboards will replace anyone tomorrow. It's that when the most credentialed director alive says you can make a film in your private room before involving the crew, that line gets quoted in every studio budget meeting for the next ten years. Unions can negotiate against tools. They can't negotiate against permission.
