Filmmaker David Goyer Bets on Blockchain for Next Sci-Fi Franchise

TORONTO — David Goyer, the filmmaker whose credits include the Blade trilogy, The Dark Knight, and Apple TV’s Foundation series, said Friday he is building a new blockchain-based science-fiction universe called Emergence.

The world of Emergence, according to Goyer, features spaceships, relic-hunting and white holes — science-fiction staples that will serve as the foundation for a sprawling transmedia project built inside Incention, Goyer’s new blockchain platform.

In a panel discussion at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Toronto, Goyer appeared alongside SY Lee of Story Protocol, the intellectual property-focused blockchain upon which Incention and Emergence are based. There, Goyer laid out his vision for Incention, saying the platform will allow fans to co-create the Emergence universe alongside professional storytellers.

“The idea is that we’re going to involve the community in all of this, and they’ll have an opportunity to create characters who will be joining the podcast, joining the animation, etc.,” he said.

Goyer criticized Hollywood’s approach to IP-building, calling it “very top down” and slow to adapt. “Franchises are built in the film and television industry [on] models that are a century old,” he said. “It’s very hard to innovate. It’s very hard to break into Hollywood if you’re a newcomer.” Web3, he added, could help change that.

Story Protocol, launched in 2023, has raised more than $80 million from backers including a16z, Hashed, and Endeavor. The platform offers tools for registering, tracking and monetizing intellectual property on the blockchain.

“Each intellectual property has its own program, licensing and royalty-sharing rights,” Lee explained on Friday. “Without any middleman, someone can remix, license, and basically build upon someone else’s IP,” he added. “According to the rules set by the IP owner […] they could share the upside together.”

Goyer said he wrote a 2,500-page story bible to anchor the Emergence universe. “We hired a bunch of really talented concept artists that had worked on the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises, and a number of Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction authors to write stories within the universe using the bible that I created,” he said.

That material also served as the training data for an AI agent, dubbed “Atlas,” which Goyer said will help contributors co-create within a pre-defined narrative framework.

“This is what I would say is sort of a sanctioned use of AI, where we’re not just scraping information,” he said.

Visitors to the Emergence platform can read about its characters and settings or generate their own. The community may then upvote user-generated stories and visuals. An editorial board — chaired by Goyer — will determine which submissions become part of the official canon.

“We’ll let our community up-vote the characters that the community themselves have created,” he said. “Then the editorial board — which is myself and a few other people — will decide which of these characters best suits the overall franchise.”

“AI, Web3, blockchain — none of this stuff is going away, right? The whole world’s becoming tokenized,” Goyer said. “So, for my sake, I just thought this is something I need to learn about and get involved in.”

While AI and blockchain have raised fears of job loss and the commodification of creative labor, Goyer said his hope is to use the technology in ways that empower artists.

“It’s really about deciding whether I’m going to stick my head in the sand, or I’m going to have a seat at the table and see, in my own small way, whether or not I can help guide this in a way that’s beneficial to creative types like myself,” he said.