The Rise And Fall Of AI-Generated Trailers

In December of 2024, a strange clip went mega-viral on X (formerly known as Twitter). It wasn’t the best quality, and appeared to be surreptitiously filmed in a movie theater. It was, seemingly, a trailer for Jurassic World: Rebirth, and featured images of stars Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey trudging through the jungle. However, eventually it became clear this trailer wasn’t all that it seemed. ScarJo’s character suddenly grows scales on her face, and we can hear her say, “Am I turning into a dinosaur?”

Still, the crowd goes wild as the logo appears and John Williams’ iconic theme plays. But as the 30-second spot continues, the visuals get even more ridiculous. Suddenly, Scarlett Johansson’s character is just a velociraptor with a ponytail. That’s when it becomes clear: this trailer isn’t even real. Every bit of it, from the visuals to the speech, was created by AI.

Universal was quick to respond to this “leaked” trailer. Thanks to copyright claims, it’s now completely wiped from the face of the internet. But AI trailers aren’t going anywhere. If you do a YouTube search for the trailer of any upcoming blockbuster movie that hasn’t started production, you’re likely to find a crop of trailers that rely on generative AI. Take, for example, the video results for “Avengers: Doomsday trailer.”

Fan-made trailers are nothing new — since the beginning of YouTube, fans have stitched together unrelated movie clips or even picked up a camera themselves and pitched their own movie ideas in the form of a homegrown trailer. But with the dawn of AI, these trailers have morphed into something a bit more devious: trailers that, to the discerning eye, could absolutely be taken for the real thing.

Three of the four results pictured above are from Screen Culture, a massively popular YouTube channel with 1.4 million subscribers. The channel posts two trailers a day, a brutal pace that often requires going back to the same well over and over — there are, for example, almost 40 videos solely devoted to a Marvel Fantastic Four movie.

The man behind the channel is Nikhil Chaudhari, who touts his company, Screen Network, as a “multi-million dollar media empire” on his Instagram page, full of hustle-and-grind encouragement posts and a pinned post showing his gold YouTube Play button in the front seat of his Mustang. This money comes not only from ad revenue but also memberships — Screen Culture offers tiered subscriptions with perks like polls about future trailers and reviews of subscribers’ own trailers.

“It’s always been my dream to make a trailer so good that you can’t tell whether it’s a concept or an official trailer.”

“As a movie buff myself, I always used to wait for trailers for my favorite subjects,” Chaudhari tells Inverse. “Usually, there were only a couple of people who used to create these concept trailers on YouTube. Sometimes I would click on them just to get a feel of the movie since official trailers were not out.” It was while watching those trailers that he realized he could create something better. Since its launch in 2018, Screen Culture has grown to a company of over a dozen people.

While AI is used in the generative stage, much of the initial process involves humans. “Once a topic is decided, I assign it to one of our editors with direction on how I want the trailer to be and what should be in it from start to finish,” Chaudhari says. “I personally like to be very detailed.” Next, he works with other editors to create an intriguing thumbnail, like the thumbnail for the Wednesday Season 2 trailer that shows the underage characters Wednesday and Enid scantily clad in bed together, or the three different ones that show them in bikinis, or the two separate ones that show Wednesday topless.

Finally, the trailer is given a description, a paragraph or two described as the “inspiration” for the video. This is where things get tricky — without exception, the descriptions for the most recent trailers aren’t written organically or even AI-generated: they’re pulled whole cloth from Screen Rant articles, all without any semblance of credit.

“Screen Rant uses a lot of our trailers and writes articles about it, and we use text from that article,” Chaudhari says. However, the articles these quotes come from aren’t just limited to articles about Screen Culture videos. When I ask Chaudhari to clarify, he admits he doesn’t just take from Screen Rant, but also CBR and “other similar sites,” and that sometimes AI is used to generate “variations of articles” about that specific topic, though I haven’t been able to find any sources other than Screen Rant during my research.

Chaudhari also claims that AI work only factors into about a quarter of what ends up on the channel, with the majority being clips from existing work — previous seasons, existing teasers, or clips of other works actors have been in. A look at the most recent videos on the channel reveals the balance is more like half and half, with more speculative trailers, like the one for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, relying more on AI.

What’s the Purpose?

Interestingly, Screen Culture’s most popular video isn’t for any exciting upcoming release: it’s for a completely non-existent project, a Harry Potter sequel. This poses a bit of an ethical issue for these trailer channels: are these trailers meant to pose a clever “What if?” like the AI generated videos of movies in the style of Wes Anderson, or are they meant to deceive viewers into thinking the projects featured are actually happening?

There are whole channels that focus on creating these speculative trailers. Ibraev Samat is the creator of the channel Multiverse of Movies, a channel probably best known for the AI-heavy trailer for a live-action version of The Simpsons, currently standing at 8.9 million views. AI-generated visions of Adam Sandler as Homer Simpson and Kristen Wiig as Marge move uncannily while an AI version of Sandler’s voice delivers narration.

Unlike Screen Culture, Multiverse of Movies works with AI from start to finish. “I use ChatGPT to help with scriptwriting and casting,” Samat tells Inverse. “For example, I might ask ChatGPT: ‘Write an intro script as if Homer Simpson were introducing all the characters from The Simpsons.’ And ‘Suggest Hollywood actors for The Simpsons live-action adaptation.’”

From there, Midjourney and ElevenLabs are used to create the images and dialogue. However, both of these services have policies around replicating celebrities’ likenesses and voices, so Samat uses Photoshop and “Fakeyou.com” as a workaround. Unlike Screen Culture, Samat is the sole creator for his videos, and they usually take around 12 hours to create.

“My goal is not to deceive viewers but rather to intrigue them with unusual character combinations, alternative castings, or reimaginings of well-known stories,” Samat says. “That’s the unique aspect of my content. YouTube is a platform where people love fan theories, crossovers, and creative experiments, and I try to work in that direction, not only to attract attention but also to build a long-term audience interested in these ideas.”

“It’s an art, in my opinion.”

Chaudhari has a similar stance. “Our main purpose here is to entertain people as much as possible; it’s always our intention,” he says. “Sometimes — very rarely — we don’t hit the mark, but more often than not, we deliver quality to fandom. Sometimes they love it and appreciate the effort and sometimes they just hate it, which is also understandable.”

However, it’s hard to ignore the pains taken by these channels to seem like “the real thing.” Screen Culture will format its thumbnails to directly copy those of the studio the work belongs to — for example, a Last of Us trailer will have a blue border like an HBO trailer, while a Squid Game trailer will include the Netflix logo and the title in block letters in the bottom left corner.

Chaudhari has a creative stance to defend this choice. “Someone great once said, ‘a lie is just [a] great story someone ruined with the truth,’” he says. (In case you were wondering, that’s a quote from Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother.)

Samat is more upfront that the purpose of Multiverse of Movies is, ultimately, engagement. Unlike Screen Culture, MoM’s videos often include “official trailer” in the video titles, a tactic he admits is purely for clicks. “Using the title ‘Official Trailer’ in thumbnails is, of course, a way to attract viewers’ attention, increase click-through rate (CTR), and, consequently, improve the video’s promotion through YouTube’s algorithm,” he says. “However, it’s important to understand that this is just one promotional tool, not a guarantee of success.” YouTube’s algorithm, he emphasizes, considers not only clickability but audience retention and engagement with the video. So no matter how intriguing the title is, the content has to be of good quality too.

Unfortunately, once viewers realize what they are watching isn’t official at all, there can often be pushback through hateful comments, but even this is a blessing in disguise for Samat. “I actually view such comments positively—any engagement under the video, even negative, influences its promotion,” he says. “The more discussions there are, the higher the chances that YouTube's algorithms will pick up the video and recommend it to a new audience.”

But where is the line between an enticing trailer that gets clicks and a trailer that infringes on a studio’s intellectual property? The answer is a little complicated, but the use of AI makes it more cut-and-dry than you think.

The Legal Question

Both Screen Culture and Multiverse of Movies make it clear their trailers are simply “concept trailers” and for entertainment purposes only, but even that isn’t enough to get around a studio’s copyright protections. After all, Universal was able to wipe that Jurassic World trailer off the internet entirely.

“Sometimes we get emails from big production companies to take something down or change titles,” Chaudhari says. “We do that, because they are most of the time master copyright holders, but usually they know we exist and we promote their movies for free in a way, for better or for worse, on our channel.”

He offers, for example, Screen Culture’s trailer for the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie, a trailer he claims garnered more views than even the official Blumhouse trailer. However, complaints from Universal and Blumhouse meant all videos for that film had to be removed. Nevertheless, he insists AI usage is a “grey area” both legally and morally.

Meanwhile, Multiverse of Movies has only received one copyright warning, but it's a relatively smaller channel. Samat balances creating trailers with his full-time job as a lawyer in his home country of Kazakhstan.

But besides what the companies think, is this content even allowed on YouTube? According to IP lawyer Devin Miller, the answer is often no. “In general, creating fan-made trailers isn't illegal if they're clearly labeled as ‘fan-made’ or ‘concept' trailers,” he tells Inverse. “When you throw AI into the mix, things get … messier. If AI tools create new content by copying or remixing scenes from copyrighted movies or shows without permission, that might be copyright infringement itself. Also, using AI to imitate actors' voices or likenesses without permission can raise additional legal issues around rights of publicity and privacy.”

“When you throw AI into the mix, things get … messier.”

Chaudhari acknowledges that Screen Culture’s viewers range from those who think the trailers are real to those who know the trailer is a concept and just watch out of curiosity. But his favorite type of viewers are the ones who don’t realize the trailer is fake, but are impressed once they learn. “It’s an art, in my opinion,” he says.

There’s no denying fanworks are art — the fan-made trailers which used to dominate the internet were a form of expression just like fanart or fan fiction. But calling AI-generated trailers a new art form is like calling the ability to counterfeit money an art form. Yes, it requires tedious effort, creativity, and skill, but at the end of the day, success is dictated by how indiscernible it is from the real thing, and AI just makes that more accessible — and therefore less impressive. It all comes down to the purpose: artistic expression or deception. In speaking to these creators, the purpose seems pretty clear.

“It’s always been my dream to make a trailer so good that you can’t tell whether it’s a concept or an official trailer,” Chaudhari says. “Especially with AI, we are on a track to make that happen.”

A Twist Ending

Hours before this article was to be published, Deadline published an investigation into AI-generated trailers, with a focus on Screen Culture and the other major pillar of the subgenre, KH Studio. In response to the investigation, YouTube has removed the channels from its partner program, removing the ability for these channels to make money from their content.

Chaudhari tells Inverse this decision essentially put the channel “out of business.” While the channels have the ability to appeal the decision, it does seem like the heyday of the AI-generated trailer has passed. It doesn’t mean these videos will go anywhere — it just means YouTube will stop rewarding those who make them as a living.