12 No./ What the Non-fungible Token?
Empire delves into Hollywood’s intensifying flirtation with NFTS
IN 1968, Planet Of The Apes first dropped its climactic bombshell on viewers, Charlton Heston’s stranded astronaut realising with horror that apes had inhabited the Earth. In 2022, we now know how he felt. Since April last year, The Bored Ape Yacht Club — a key player in the world of NFTS — has risen from a baffling, peripheral development on the internet to a multi-million-dollar endeavour endorsed by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Eminem.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is probably the best, and worst, entry point into NFTS (non-fungible tokens). This limited collection of human-like monkey caricatures is comprised of individual digital artworks, bought via cryptocurrency and owned and traded exclusively online. It’s like Pokémon cards, but for people with a lot of spare cash, and with greater risk; as with everything that pivots on cryptocurrency, NFTS’ monetary values can plummet at any minute.
But why should film-lovers care about this? Because NFTS don’t end with cartoon monkeys. There’s no end to what can be sold as an NFT — from digital doodles to Lindsay Lohan’s original music — and Hollywood has caught wind of it. Quentin Tarantino has decided to release digitised pages from his original handwritten Pulp Fiction screenplay, along with personalised audio commentaries, as NFTS. Kevin Smith has turned an entire film — his upcoming horror Killroy Was Here — into an NFT, meaning that the winning bidder can do with it what they please. “Whoever buys it could choose to monetise it traditionally, or simply own a film that nobody ever sees but them,” said Smith in a statement.
Yet Reese Witherspoon has taken the craze to another level, announcing a partnership between her production company, Hello Sunshine, and World Of Women, an all-female NFT collective. This means that her company can take World Of Women’s tokens — a mix of trippy illustrations and fantasy figures — and turn them from online artwork into TV show and movies.
With old movies’ components being turned into NFTS, new movies being turned into NFTS, and NFTS being turned into movies, it could be only a matter of time before bored apes begin to infiltrate your movie screens. As long as Hollywood continues to claim a stake in this perplexing digital trend, you might want to brush up on your crypto jargon and prepare for monkey supremacy.