Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, the German image-generation startup last valued at $3.25 billion, the company confirmed to The New York Times on June 2, 2026. The director, one of the most decorated filmmakers alive, said he will use the technology strictly for storyboarding — a narrow brief, but a striking endorsement from a figure who has spent decades inside the traditional studio system.
Black Forest Labs is a 70-person outfit headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, near the actual Black Forest, rather than San Francisco. Its image models already sit behind generative features inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta, making it one of the most widely deployed image-AI providers outside the headline US labs. The company was founded by veterans of the original Stable Diffusion team.
Scorsese framed the partnership in workflow terms. The tool, he told the Times, lets him communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers far faster than the hand-drawn boards he has produced across seven decades of filmmaking.
Key facts
- 01Martin Scorsese joined Black Forest Labs as a partner and adviser, the company confirmed to The New York Times on June 2, 2026.
- 02Black Forest Labs was last valued at $3.25 billion and powers image features inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta.
- 03The 70-person company is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, and was founded by members of the original Stable Diffusion team.
- 04Scorsese says he is using the tools strictly for storyboarding, a craft he has practiced for 70 years.
- 05Black Forest Labs declined to extend its earlier work with Elon Musk's xAI on Grok's image generator, citing content-safeguard concerns.
The Scorsese tie-in is not arms-length. Among Black Forest Labs' investors is BroadLight Capital, co-founded by Rick Yorn — who is also Scorsese's longtime talent manager. That relationship likely shortened the path from cold pitch to signed advisory role, and it embeds the director inside the company's cap-table orbit rather than as a one-off marketing face.
The startup has been selective about whom it works with at the model layer. Black Forest Labs declined to deepen a partnership with Elon Musk's xAI in recent months, after an earlier collaboration powering Grok's image generator ended over concerns about xAI's content safeguards, according to Wired. Walking away from a frontier-lab distribution deal is a notable choice for a company at the $3.25 billion valuation tier, where most peers are racing to lock in enterprise channels.
The Hollywood backdrop is what makes the announcement load-bearing. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes ended with explicit contractual guardrails against generative AI replacing writers and performers, and the broader creative-labor posture toward image and video models has been adversarial. A Scorsese co-sign — even one carefully scoped to pre-production storyboarding, not final-frame generation — gives the technology a credibility anchor that a younger director's endorsement would not.
The scope matters. Storyboards are an internal communication artifact, not a deliverable that ships to audiences, and they do not raise the same union, likeness, or training-data questions that AI-generated performances or finished VFX shots do. By drawing the line there, Scorsese is effectively defining a use case the industry can debate on narrower terms.
Concerns inside the entertainment industry will not go away on the strength of one advisory deal. The training-data provenance of image models, the displacement of concept artists and pre-visualization studios, and the absence of standardized licensing frameworks for film inputs remain unresolved. Black Forest Labs has not publicly detailed how its models were trained, and Scorsese's statement does not address that question.
The commercial read for Black Forest Labs is straightforward: a celebrity adviser at this tier of fame is a procurement signal to studios and agencies that have been hesitant to put generative image tools into named pipelines. Combined with the existing distribution footprint inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta, the company is positioning itself as the default image layer for creative software — and the Scorsese tie is the kind of trust marker that competitors with bigger model budgets cannot easily buy.
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