With Halloween now only two weeks away, the full brunt of spooky season is in play. And for those who like a scary movie, Blumhouse’s latest move just might be far scarier than normal. But for completely different reasons. It is working with Meta Platforms (META) on a new AI movie generation system, and shareholders were reasonably pleased, giving Meta a fractional boost in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
Blumhouse is well known for its horror franchises. From The Purge to Five Nights at Freddy’s, Blumhouse has delivered some truly impressive pieces over the last decade or so. But its work with Meta might be the scariest of all, at least for some. Blumhouse will reportedly be using Meta’s Movie Gen platform, which allows users to make their own video and audio clips from a user prompt.
Meta, for its part, believes that the tool is a match for the current offerings from competitors like ElevenLabs and even OpenAI. But with Blumhouse putting the tool to work, we should get a much better idea of what it can do in the hands of a major operation. While Blumhouse CEO and namesake Jason Blum believes that generative AI can be a help for human storytellers, others believe it is only a matter of time until the human element of art is mostly removed.
Meta Is Also Facing a Lawsuit
Meanwhile, Meta is also facing down a lawsuit from over half of the United States’ supply of state attorneys general. The suit now encompasses 34 different states, all claiming that Meta “knowingly contributed to a youth mental health crisis by getting kids hooked on social media,” noted a Bloomberg report.
But a federal judge in California is allowing the suit against Meta to go through in part. While the judge in question, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, noted that Meta’s “…alleged yearslong public campaign of deception as to the risks…” of social media addiction could have a case by itself, the provisions of Section 230 in the Communications Decency Act “…provide(s) a fairly significant limitation on these claims.”
Is Meta Platforms a Good Stock to Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on META stock based on 42 Buys, four Holds, and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 83.47% rally in its share price over the past year, the average META price target of $621.71 per share implies 7.19% upside potential.
