THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE CASE VIDEO by Karunasagar Sridharan

The year was 2030. AI was smarter. Film-making was cheaper. Everyone was a filmmaker. But the Academy Awards committee was in a fix. How could a jury possibly watch 8,000 2-hour long movies in one month? The consultant had a brainwave. What if every entrant was required to summarize the plot into a 2-minute case study video? Watching 8,000 2-minute videos is tough, but at least it’s possible. ‘But won’t we be biased towards the movies we’ve actually watched in entirety? How is that fair to the others?’, asked the chairman. ‘The jury won’t be allowed to watch a single film’, came the reply. ‘And those who’ve watched a film beforehand must abstain from voting for it.’ 

It isn’t easy to judge a movie by its plot summary alone, but that’s a skill that the jury had to master quickly. The 2030 Oscars picks weren’t well-received. The winning films had interesting plots for sure, but not much else, according to the internet. No one had heard of these films and the few who’d watched them, felt nothing for them. The leaked jury-notes sparked off an even bigger furore. Scorsese’s new film didn’t even make it to the shortlist, on account of having a plot that ‘sounded like a typical mafia story’. Nolan’s plot was rejected for having ‘too much plot to realistically accommodate into a 3-hour film’. The chairman wanted the 2031 jury to learn from these mistakes. So he installed security cameras to prevent leaks. 

The 2031 Oscar picks were just as poorly received, but it was too late to put the genie back into the bottle. Disillusioned entrants had realized that plot summaries matter more to the jury than the performances, the moments, the aesthetics, and the emotional graphs that they’ll never be allowed to experience. So they hired consultants to help them rewrite their 2-minute plot summaries to make them sound more ‘unique’ and ‘award-worthy’. A biopic about a famous athlete making a comeback was repackaged as a movie about an athlete afraid to come out of the closet. ‘But her sexuality is mentioned in literally just one scene of the movie!’, quipped the director. ‘Your audience loves your film for what it is. But do you want the jury to love it or not?’, came the reply.

By the third year, major studios had started hiring these Case Video Packaging Consultants even before greenlighting any movie. Filmmakers were asked to make plot-level changes in their scripts so that they could be packaged into good case study videos later on. Screenwriters dubbed this a vile perversion and a corruption of their original ideas. But screenwriters also had mouths to feed. Studio execs had ‘fame KRAs’ to meet. The new system was here to stay.

By the fourth year, plenty of reforms had been introduced to make the system feel fairer. Foreign film submissions could include a ‘Cultural context’ section to explain their plots better. Entrants could add anything to their 2-minute videos to get the jury to see their seemingly-ordinary plots in a new light. A ‘brief’ slide to explain the movie’s topicality. A ‘results’ slide to capture its popularity. Tweets, comments and talk show hosts raving about it. ‘If the jury can’t see the performances or feel the emotions, it’s only fair that they get to hear about these aspects from people who have’, said the chairman in his opening address, to thunderous applause.

As the years went by, the gap between the Oscar winners and Box office winners grew wider and wider, to a point where no one had heard of any of the Oscar winners anymore. The worldwide box office number 1 that year was ‘The Hangover 5’. The Best Picture Oscar winner was about ‘The heart-breaking story of a nonbinary HIV-positive Somali refugee who fought stigma and corruption to build a water treatment plant before breathing his last breath’, told in a moving film created with a shoestring budget in partnership with the United Nations Millennium Goals Committee to educate malnourished children about hygiene while also spreading awareness about the effects of global warming on the underground water supply in East Africa. On the bright side, there wasn’t any internet outrage about the Oscars these days, because there wasn’t anyone watching in the first place.

Meanwhile, the next generation of film school graduates were advised to leave commercial cinema to the AI Script Factories that had churned out ‘Hangover 5’ and ‘Deadpool 7’. The only way they could break into the industry anymore was by getting the attention of the Academy Awards Jury. And the only way they could do that was by religiously rewatching winning case study videos from the past, studying the patterns, learning the tricks, emulating the themes, and second-guessing what the jury might consider ‘good cinema’. ‘Isn’t second-guessing a bad thing?’, asked a student at a film academy seminar. ‘Isn’t that what filmmakers have fought against for an entire century - research that second-guesses what the audience might like?’. With rigorous practice, the students learned to let go of their misconceptions and their old ways of thinking. A jury member’s job was to second-guess the merits of movies they’d never watched. A studio executive’s job was to second-guess what jury members might like. A screenwriter’s job was to second-guess what studio executives might greenlight. The key to success in the 2030s was to master the art of second-guessing. 

'Write the plot summary case first, show it around, pitch it to your mentors, polish it, pitch it again. Only then should you even start writing the actual screenplay’, the mentors would say. Students were encouraged to write new case videos every day, but to let only their finest and most award-worthy plot summaries into their portfolio websites. The industry was soon in the hands of a completely new crop of filmmakers and studio executives who had no baggage weighing them down. Many went on to win Oscars, win their second Oscars, write bestselling books about winning Oscars, and give talks about winning Oscars. But strangely, none of them had ever made a movie. It had been many years since the Academy had loosened its rules. They no longer needed proof that an entrant's movie was ever released or even made in the first place. If neither the jury nor the audience was ever going to watch the movie, why make it at all? The only thing of value here was a cracking case study. Adapting it into a full-length movie that no one will ever watch was nothing more than a cumbersome formality, they thought. An unnecessary vestige. A waste of time.

By the fifteenth year, the last few human filmmakers who had ever made a real movie had retired from the industry, and the art of filmmaking was long forgotten. AIs continued to make moderately-successful cookie-cutter sequels to keep the streaming giants afloat. Human filmmakers and studio executives continued to churn out case videos for films that didn’t exist. The new crop of filmmakers enjoyed a life of glamour and red carpets until the already tiny human-made-movie industry rapidly faded into obscurity. The celebrated Oscar-winning studio executive who had gone from the Forbes ‘20 under 20’ list to the ‘30 under 30’ list to the position of CEO of the biggest and last surviving human-made-movie studio was tasked with the job of announcing that they were filing for bankruptcy. It was the end of the movie industry as we knew it. 

News channels ran endless debates about what really caused the sudden death of the movie industry. Was it technology? Shrinking attention spans? Short form content? Streaming platforms? Talent crisis? Bad luck? But as the CEO’s last emotional press conference came to a close, the last question made him laugh out loud. A journalist asked, ‘Could it be that the invention of the case study video single-handedly destroyed the centuries-old art of filmmaking?’ 

The CEO let out a big laugh. ‘That’s the most ridiculous theory I’ve ever heard’, he smirked. ‘Sounds like a great movie plot, but reality is a lot more nuanced than that’.