The US release of "Gods Don't Give Gifts", an anthology of four animated shorts from the YouTuber Gossip Goblin (real name Zack London), has been pushed back from 30 October to 4 December. The AI studio Fable is releasing it, and has also confirmed that it will enter the film for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. A first trailer went out on 6 October and starts running before other films in theaters from that weekend, beginning in Los Angeles, New York and a few other cities.
Its audience is the open question hanging over the release. The change of date matters for how the film reaches audiences, because the trailer plays ahead of other features while the release is still weeks away. Variety and Forbes agree on the plan, and their slightly different wording about the trailer's debut describes the same rollout.
“I made these films with AI, which some people find ironic. But using a medium to interrogate that medium is one of the oldest moves in art”
Zack London (Gossip Goblin), director, to Forbes · yahoo.com ↗
It is an R-rated film that will open on fewer than 1,000 US screens, and no distributor has been named. London puts his following at around four million and says about 60% of it lives outside the US, a figure the reporting could not verify. Fable is also in talks with UK cinemas, so the film may not stay a US-only release. The story is set in what the Gossip Goblin universe calls the second cycle of humanity, one of thirteen, and is a satire of how society relates to AI, which gives the marketing a world to build on.
The awards push is the larger part of the plan, and it comes with a schedule: voter screenings and critic previews first, then the Los Angeles billboards. Fable intends to hold those screenings and previews and to put the billboards up from November. Fable CEO Edward Saatchi calls it the first AI film with a real chance at a nomination, and compares its potential to what Toy Story was for an earlier generation. The only R-rated film nominated in the category before was Anomalisa, in 2015.
Saatchi's reasoning is that the Academy's position leaves room for an AI-made film: nothing in the rules stops it competing on its merits. Saatchi has been asking when an AI film would first be in the running for a statuette, and he now answers that this is the one with a shot. That is why Fable talks about a nomination as the realistic goal and sees the rest as open from there.
Around the release, the campaign leans on fan participation. There is a fan-film contest with a $15,000 prize, a limited run of prototype sneakers made with Fctry Lab, an ambassador program for fans, and "lore teasers" tied to an in-world TV network called NiiroCore Broadcasting.
London resists the "AI movie" label. He says human writers, voice actors, musicians and Foley artists worked on the film, and that AI mainly let a small team avoid committees and other constraints. The Academy's rule from May bars AI actors and AI-assisted scripts, but also states that using AI tools neither helps nor hurts a nomination. Saatchi's own caveat is that if audiences see it as an ordinary movie it should do well, while those who see an AI experiment may wait for it on YouTube.
Fable and London announced the theatrical plan in July, after the earlier YouTube-born features Backrooms, which took $401 million, and Iron Lung, at $51.2 million. The Academy rule, Backrooms and Iron Lung together frame the bet Fable is making: that a creator who built an audience online can carry it into cinemas, and that voters will judge the result as a film. Saatchi, who runs Fable, is treating the trailer's view count as an early test of whether fans will pay for tickets.
Sources · 2