AI Probably Won't Kill Hollywood
Don't worry about trying to count Pedro Pascal's fingers for a while
Google has just released its newest updated cinematic-quality video AI software, and the results are pretty phenomenal. It’s impressive enough to have reignited the cheers of the online dipshit chorus who feel they are finally one step closer to permanently vanquishing human civilization’s greatest enemy: People who create stuff.
This is the same wave of insufferable scorn that drenched social media during the 2023 combined actors and writers strikes, when a bunch of folks reacted to the potential for massive entertainment industry layoffs with a level of glee usually reserved for the introduction of new automated systems that might finally put all those uppity minimum wage workers back on the street where they belong.
Right-wing and reactionary cultures have a very strange and high-friction relationship with the media they consume in the sense that they all feel a desire to be entertained but they hate the people who create entertainment, virtually on principle, which goes a long way to explaining why they’re so mad at culture all the time.
There’s a number of things at play here, but I think a major element is that there’s the perception of creative work as requiring no skill, and how that contradicts how difficult it is to be successful at it, two concepts that many attempt to reconcile by imagining a conspiracy.
Combine that with the tendency to bemoan an overabundance of “woke” messaging, which I feel is also largely imagined even if it’s occasionally a valid complaint (and even then it’s usually more a result of poor writing rather than nefarious agenda insertion) then you have the makings of a legitimate scandal: Rich elites control the entertainment industry to push “messages” and “values,” and once you start seeing this as an actual conspiracy then confirmation bias will prevent you from really enjoying much of anything. “Messages” and “values” have been an innate part of storytelling since forever, and the argument can be made that storytelling evolved as a vessel for messages and values.
In any case, the excitement over AI potentially replacing the film industry can be understood as people viewing their own desire for entertainment as an addiction, and Google’s new MovieBot is a way for them to control their addiction, not by quitting it, but by removing the toxins from it, where the toxins are, in this case, the unknown agendas of strangers. The illusion of every addict is of course that there’s some way to continue to indulge without any of the harmful side effects (in this case, evil elite Wokes continuing to afford food and rent).
All that said, I’m skeptical that AI is actually going to do much to heavily disrupt the movie industry. I won’t say “never,” simply because that’s a bet that wouldn’t expire until the heat death of the universe, but I still don’t think it will happen any time soon and that’s because my prediction has nothing to do with the actual level of sophistication of the technology. People focus entirely on how good the AI is in replicating cinematic quality video and totally ignore unrelated aspects of psychology, like…
People don’t really make art to entertain themselves
The whole idea of AI killing the entertainment industry and putting the power to create movies back into the people’s hands is that you’ll finally get to see the movies that you want to see, based on what you tell the computer that you want to see. You’ll never again need to encounter a theme or a value that you object to being pushed on you as a moral lesson.
That’s not really something people do, though.
There are many different reasons why people create art, and many are deeply personal. Entertainment, specifically, is almost always a social activity. Advancements in media tend to increase the social reach and impact that individuals have. There isn’t likely to be a strong trend of people AI-generating feature length movies and then watching those movies. There’s just no appeal.
As a matter of fact, I can generate entire movies and watch them without the assistance of an advanced cinematic AI tool. It’s called using my imagination and the pictures play in my head, I don’t even need an expensive home theatre.
Sure, it can be interesting to put prompts into a computer and see the computer bring them to life. I got a thrill out of that for, like, a whole afternoon when Adobe introduced an image generator to its app package. That got boring way faster than I initially expected it to, like I was playing Solitaire.
But then, nobody’s really saying that’s what they want to do with this technology, and presumably the real anticipated scenario is something like a Netflix that anyone can upload to.
But that’s just YouTube. Would YouTube replace Hollywood if all of its creators suddenly had access to cinematic quality AI generation tools, or would it be just the same ratio of unwatchable slop, except that now it’s HD slop?
On that note:
People have a limited amount of patience for the unknown
As I said, people’s (reactionaries in particular) big beef with Hollywood is largely based on a conspiracy theory that ordinary people are locked out of the industry—which is true in some ways but not really the ways that they imagine. People have a limited amount of time to spend on entertainment, let alone feature length films, and they will mostly take safe bets with that time budget. That means they will mostly watch things they are reasonably sure they will enjoy based on established trust.
This is why films based on strong IP are safe bets even when the movie itself is objectively garbage, and the stronger the IP the longer you can go on making garbage before people bail out (looking at you, Jurassic World: Dominion. Fucking locusts? Seriously?) This is why studios will prominently advertise the name of a film’s director, or lead actor, or even its producers if they’re shared with some other hit movie (nobody knows what a producer does).
If you’re some complete unknown, you have to work a lot harder than established names and properties to get people to even glance at your work. A lot harder. Not due to any conspiracy but due to practical realities of your audience’s lives.
This is true not just for movies but any longer form media. This is how people speedrun the development of a fanbase on microblogging social media platforms, where it’s harder to get attention for something longer form like a Substack. There are some very popular and prominent Substack writers I won’t name (and this isn’t an invitation for commenters to speculate—I don’t want to be mean) who I think are pretty overrated, but continue to get a lot more attention over better writers just because people like them enough and, more importantly, know what to expect.
When people do scroll around looking for something different to watch or read, you get about ten seconds to grab their attention, and your spiffy new AI software isn’t going to help you there because…
When everyone’s super, no-one will be
Whatever complaints people might have about the movie industry, you’ll never hear people say the problem is that there aren’t enough movies. Whine about gatekeeping all you want, but it’s a lot easier for the average chump to make a movie today than it was even 20 years ago and easier at a scale that people 50 years ago couldn’t even conceive.
That means a lot more quality films, but it also means a lot more slop. The slop just naturally doesn’t rise to the top if it doesn’t have anything special to offer.
You can get some impression of what I mean if you browse the depths of Amazon Prime, which has a much lower bar for entry than, say, Netflix. You’ll find a lot of B-grade and C-grade movies, and a lot of them closely mimic already popular films, especially groundbreaking ones like The Matrix or Alien.
Unestablished filmmakers will copy popular films for a lot of reasons and not all of them are bad. Sometimes it’s homage, sometimes it’s practice, but a lot of the time it’s trying to jump on the familiarity bandwagon to get a leg up over the competition in the attention market (see: patience for the unknown, above).
But imitation itself just isn’t enough. You have to bring something to the table, or else you’re still just swimming in an ocean of slop. When this Fairy Googlemother floats down with its magic wand and grants everyone with a computer the ability to generate cinematic quality films, it’s just going to be one of those Evil Genie cliches in the end—everyone who was on the same playing field before is still on the same playing field no matter how high you elevate the playing field. The slop is going to be better-looking, but so is everything. That’s not disrupting Hollywood, that’s polishing it.
The AI isn’t going to help in this regard because literally all it can do is imitate established films. That’s what it is. The people pushing this technology as a Hollywood-killer are even making this very nonsensical and contradictory point: Check out how well this AI can make a slightly (and sometimes considerably) poorer quality version of a special effect that you previously enjoyed!!
When everyone has access to the same technology then getting noticed at all is still going to mean that you have to bring something novel to the table, and the most successful method of creating that novelty is likely going to be that you… uhh… didn’t use an AI.
With that in mind…
People generally look down on AI and that’s unlikely to change soon
The “AI will destroy Hollywood” cheerleaders are almost always viewing the situation through Grok-coloured glasses because they are tech geeks who stan the technology itself and don’t recognise the extent to which normies in the greater filmgoing audience view generative AI with skepticism at best, boycott-scale derision at worst, and exhaustion in general.
If people were actually receptive to AI killing and replacing established entertainment industries then the book industry would be stone dead as of three years ago. The general public has had the ability to generate entire books via ChatGPT for quite some time, and they could probably pass for some equivalent bestsellers at least in the self-help section, but Barnes and Noble still isn’t full of AI-generated books and doesn’t look to be for a long time. AI-generated books actually have flooded the book industry, in self-publishing and on Amazon, but the only way they have “disrupted” it is to make it more annoying… to avoid the AI-generated books.
Take a step back to my generation in the evolution of geekdom. I’m a millennial. Hi! We’re middle-aged now, we can quote every line of every episode of the first 9 seasons of The Simpsons, and we don’t know what the fuck a skibidi is.
Film geeks of my generation are huge into practical effects—puppets and props—over CGI. That’s why we love the shit out of Jurassic Park, and The Thing, and why the latter’s canonical prequel, also titled The Thing, is regarded such a betrayal (even though I will privately confess I think it’s a comparably good movie). There is an artisanship in practical effects that just isn’t present with CGI.
Now here’s another thing: I’ve known people who work in CGI in the film industry and I know there is an artisanship in CGI. It’s also something that’s very difficult to master, and probably no easier to master than really good practical effects. It’s a different form of artistry and one that is only now becoming fully accepted as such.
I am told that there is an artisanship to generative AI, that the skill comes from engineering prompts (the intricacy in which you can instruct the machine what to do). I do believe this, because I’ve dabbled with generative AI for the header images for this very newsletter—sometimes with partial success, but to be honest, most of the time I just wind up Photoshopping something instead because that takes less effort than wrangling the AI to produce something that looks even a little bit good.
(The image I used for this piece is AI generated but it’s a hoax picture that circulated the internet during the January 2025 Los Angeles fires and I thought it was fitting for that reason on multiple levels)
That said, I’m actually not convinced that an AI-generated film good enough to compete with modern Hollywood will require any less effort in writing, editing, and other creative and artistic fields. So the only people out of work will be the more trade-related studio jobs that the reactionaries should ostensibly be rooting for much more than the cuck shitlib artists they hate so much.
And any such film will still get its ass kicked at the box office by the very first live action $300 budget Nicolas Cage film that comes along to compete with it.
On the subject of reactionary geek culture, I'm writing a whole book about it. More specifically, how internet culture hijacked western politics within a single generation. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
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