The first episode of Secret Invasion premiered to Disney+ subscribers earlier this week, and while there’s been quite a bit of chatter over how Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury was hit with a devastating loss, arguably more attention has been dedicated to the Marvel show’s opening credits. Many fans took to social media to note how the artwork on the screen as the show’s key cast and crew members were shown looked like it was AI-generated, and sure enough, it was. Now Method Studios, the company behind the opening credits, has responded to fans’ complaints about their product.
Given all the talk surrounding AI’s use in the entertainment industry in recent months, the concern is that the creation of Secret Invasion’s opening credits in this fashion cost artists their jobs, but Method Studios has said this isn’t the case. Here’s what the company in a statement to THR:
AI is just one tool among the array of tool sets our artists used. No artists’ jobs were replaced by incorporating these new tools; instead, they complemented and assisted our creative teams.
Method Studios further stated that while it used “existing and custom AI tools in creating the characters’ attributes and movements in the opening,” the production of the opening credits as a whole still involved “ traditional work of the art department, animators, compositors and other artists.” In other words, it sounds like original artwork was still created for the credits, and then the AI was used to augment it, rather than the AI just pulling from previously-created artwork online. Prior to the release of this statement, Secret Invasion director Ali Selim told Polygon that AI was utilized for the credits to pass along a sense of “foreboding” tied into the Skrulls’ shapeshifting ability, and that what Method Studios put together “felt explorative and inevitable, and exciting, and different.”
With just one episode out of six having been released, folks who tune into Secret Invasion have five more weeks to get used to these opening credits. Regarding the show itself, the first two episodes of Secret Invasion were met with mixed reception from critics, and this MCU entry currently ranks at 66% on Rotten Tomatoes, though the Audience Score is a more positive 80%. Inspired by the same-named crossover event published in 2008, Secret Invasion follows Nick Fury investigating a group of Skrulls that have seized positions of power in human society in order to take over Earth. The show’s other familiar faces include Ben Mendelsohn, Don Cheadlie, Cobie Smulders and Martin Freeman, and the newcomers include Kingsley Ben-Adir, Emilia Clarke, Olivia Colman and Dermot Mulroney.
New episodes of Secret Invasion drop Wednesdays on Disney+, which is also home to numerous other MCU shows, as well as where you can watch nearly all the Marvel movies in order. For all your non-MCU-related programming details, look through our 2023 TV schedule.