AI has already proven it won't save the movies

But despite reckoning with AI’s potential to demolish jobs three years ago, and again in the most recent contract negotiations, there is still no indication that AI is actually saving Hollywood. When it is mentioned, it’s usually negative—such as when Darren Aronofsky made a whole Revolutionary War miniseries with AI, or when the trailer dropped for a film starring Val Kilmer, who died in 2025 and hadn’t been able to use his natural voice since 2015. Even critical darlings haven’t escaped the backlash. The Brutalist’s editor admitted he used AI tools to improve the Hungarian accents of the leads and people were furious. Turns out the wider public is all aghast by uses of AI, not held in rapture.

Which is funny because AI was used for years with little backlash—it’s been particularly useful when effects artists need to paint an actor’s face onto a stunt double’s or make an ancient actor look young again. It was how Martin Scorsese managed to get half the cast of The Irishman looking younger. It wasn’t a problem in 2019 because Scorsese paid effects artists to do the work, and AI made that work go a lot faster for the artists. 

Now it makes you a pariah to even mention AI. It has, for many people, become indicative of greed. There’s a sense of moral failure if you embrace AI in Hollywood. That’s why A24, revered by film nerds everywhere, had to publicly defend its recent deal with Google. People thought A24 was different, but ultimately A24 would “rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines,” Sophia Shin, who runs communications at A24, told Wired. 

But FOMO is a reason to stop scrolling Instagram, not do million-dollar deals with tech companies. Hollywood should have learned that when everyone had an NFT ape. Instead you get silly deals. After OpenAI created a lot of buzz with its video platform Sora, Disney rushed to get its piece of the potential pie. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” then-CEO Bob Iger said in a press release announcing the deal.

But four months after that corporate speak-styled press release, OpenAI killed Sora. “The deal is not moving forward,” Iger had to tell Deadline. The collapse of that deal was rumored to be part of OpenAI’s larger crisis around having enough computational power (also known as compute) to do all the cool things they promise AI can do. But perhaps Iger and co. finally looked at the app they’d made a deal to be a part of and realized it was TikTok slop.

AI is on rocky footing right now. Both OpenAI and Anthropic, the two biggest AI model makers in the U.S., are now competing with open source models from China that have the full backing of the Chinese government. To compete. they fully believe they need compute and that’s made them desperate for powerful computers to train and run their powerful models. That in turn has kicked off a data center construction boom, with every rando with a few million dollars and a dream of bigger dollar signs building data centers in the hopes of leasing their servers and cashing in on the AI boom too.

A24, Disney, and everyone else inking deals with these AI companies are in the same boat as the data center builders. They see a wave of cash and they want to make sure they can catch the wave, not get killed by it. That’s not how you save a whole industry from extinction. That’s just fear and greed.

“If Hollywood had a soul, it would chase AI boosters out with pitchforks,” AI critic Ed Zitron told me over the phone. “AI-generated video sucks, looks awful, costs an incredible sum and lacks any of the actual features of even the lowest quality shittiest written movie in history.” It’s not going to save Hollywood any more than 3D movies, dine-in theaters, 4DX, or NFTs did. It’s best used as a tool to replace faces, not remake the whole industry.