OpenAI is betting Hollywood friendships will sell ChatGPT

OpenAI's Hollywood push runs on dinners and friendships, according to a profile of the executive leading it that The Verge surfaced on Monday.

The Verge's Mia Sato pointed readers to "Charles Porch Is OpenAI's Hollywood Whisperer," a New York Magazine profile by Charlotte Klein published in Intelligencer. It follows Charles Porch, a former Instagram partnerships executive whom OpenAI hired to seed its tools inside the entertainment industry.

What Is OpenAI's Hollywood Strategy?

Porch is OpenAI's first vice president of global creative partnerships and started in March, Vanity Fair reported when it announced the hire on February 18, 2026. He reports to Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications. The profile describes a first year spent on relationships: a listening tour through New York and Los Angeles, meetings with HBO showrunners, a trip to the Cannes Film Festival, and dinners for TBPN, the tech podcast OpenAI acquired in April. "It's not about deals; it's about relationships," Porch told the Intelligencer, in a passage The Verge quoted. At one dinner in New York, he said, three Real Housewives were in the room. "If an AI model comes up on the show, it might be Chat because we have this nice drumbeat," he said.

Klein writes that it is "hard to say what exactly is supposed to result from this strategy" and the profile names no studio deal the push has produced. "It's funny: I think everyone wants to hate Open AI and everyone wants to love Charles Porch," podcaster Nayeema Raza told the profile. A media executive told the Intelligencer that "the full-throated endorsement of AI is probably the biggest third-rail issue in Hollywood right now."

OpenAI's last Hollywood push ended in retreat. The company shut down its Sora app and website, a move the BBC reported on March 25, 2026, and it retired the Sora 2 models and Videos API on September 24, 2026, according to OpenAI's developer documentation. The BBC also reported OpenAI was winding down its $1 billion content partnership with Disney. Google has moved into the gap. The Los Angeles Times, read via its Yahoo Finance syndication, reported on August 31, 2026 that Google executives approached Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery about licensing intellectual property for AI models, and in June Google invested about $75 million in A24, Variety reported.

For creators pitching AI work into studios, the profile's lesson is that access and personal relationships, not model quality, decide which assistant a writer actually opens. Porch's bet is that a showrunner who knows him will reach for Chat before a rival's tool, and the profile leaves open whether that bet pays off.

Read the full profile at New York Magazine's Intelligencer; The Verge's write-up is at theverge.com.