Black Potter

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A few weeks ago HBO announced the reboot of the Harry Potter series. While this speaks to a different thread of how we are out of ideas, the more notable thing was that Snape was now going to be played by Paapa Essiedu, who is a black guy.

The internet immediately got to work with not only incredible memes, but more importantly a bunch of black Snape content from music videos, diss tracks, and even this reimaging of a swagged out version of Harry Potter called Dripwarts.

When the first video came out, I tweeted that Black Harry Potter would be a banger.

The idea is simple. Take the existing Harry Potter and use AI to swap all the characters to black actors. And not just visually, but to style each character, the dialogue, and the whole story to be more in line with what an all black Harry Potter would look like. You take something that is tried & true that works, and then make some slight mods that reformat it to fit a new audience.

It reminds me of music. Historically, popular artists were the ones playing the instruments. Today, the most popular artists are DJ's -- people that take existing songs and mix them into interesting songs / sets that are novel pieces of music of their own. It's sampling on steroids.

This is another manifestation of the juggling bears idea that I've previously written about.

I love this idea that the most interesting and popular things come from combining things that typically don't go together. One reason is that when you combine things that haven't been combined, the result is unique. But another underrated aspect is that when you combine two things, you double the market size. Fans on both sides come together for the new combined thing. I call these juggling bears.

Juggling bears are littered all over music. Not just in artists, but also in individual songs via samples. Some of the most popular songs in modern history are samples. Thank U Next, Wild Thoughts, Hotline Bling, Fantasy, etc are all samples. Summer Walker's whole catalog reads like a list of samples.

Samples take an existing song that is already popular and puts a new twist on it. Not only is the output a net new song, but the market is now twice as big. Those that loved the original will love the new song, and the rest also get a new song rooted in a something that already works. This pattern is why old trends always seem to come back in a different cycle (will write more on this later).

Now wth AI, we can get the DJ's of directors. We can now take JK Rowling's source material and quickly make Black Potter. We can take The Sopranos and make it for Chinese people. Instead of Scorsese having to spend $90M to make a western version of Infernal Affairs, someone can sample it and make it instantly.

And similarly to music, remixing via AI will dramatically open up the world of visual content. Traditional films/tv shows/etc have been declining in popularity over time. But that's not because people don't want to watch things. It's that content hasn't evolved to what people want to watch.

Similar to music, we will now 100x the types of visual media being created. The below chart shows the amount of music created over time. Each new technology is a step change in the amount being created. Each song can now live a thousand lives in a thousand different formats.

music-created-over-time

The same is finally happening for visual media. The tools are still pretty hacky, which is why we have AI fruits instead of 7 full movies of Black Potter. But as they improve, we'll see this same chart for films / tv shows.

It's an exciting time to be a director!