The ‘Will AI Kill Hollywood Narrative?’ had a moment back in 2024 when OpenAI released their SORA video generation model. For the first time, people saw an AI-generated video that was nearly equal to what they saw on TV and in the movies. OpenAI didn’t capitalise on that, but a new video AI model called Seedance looks like it might be about to fulfil that promise.
The US TV & film industry is already struggling. It rapidly expanded during Covid, but has now shrunk to be much smaller than it was before Covid. This isn’t down to AI. The hours spent watching TV & movies are shrinking, as more and more people spend their time watching online videos. These are mostly made for free by other users, or in a content-creator ecosystem separate from traditional TV/movies.
AI like Seedance looks set to turbo-charge the online content-creator ecosystem. Soon they’ll have (almost) all the advantages Hollywood has, but won’t have its costs. It’s hard to imagine that the era of movie budgets in the hundreds of millions can last much longer.
It can’t be worse than a lot of the cheap Hollywood movies that are obsessed with CGI. So I’m actually happy to see Hollywood shaken up. They’ve had a monopoly on moviemaking for way too long.
Hollywood has long been a slop machine. I won’t be too sad if it goes away.
Hollywood is already dead.
Even before getting into the slop part…
Most movies aren’t even made from a creative vision standpoint anymore.
Big corps churns the most generic, reheated, boring things that are expected to be safe bets from an investor’s perspective.
Then they put that thing no one cares about through a focus group process, which will effectively eliminate anything out of the ordinary baseline, to create the most average-feeling thing possible.Slop is also already here anyway, whether it’s AI or not.
I swear, I’d rather listen to some random kid imagining a story on the spot than whatever garbage workflow ended up making Disney’s “Wish” slop movie.That video wasn’t what it pretended to be https://www.shokunin.studio/blog/2026/2/18/is-it-all-over-for-filmmakers
While the guy makes good technical points, he’s also high on his own copium.
The only generative media enthusiasts who will have success will be those who hire skilled production professionals, writers and actors, and even then they will need to show behind the scenes production workflows. Audiences want evidence of investment, hard work and talent.
It’ll certainly be able to pump out formulaic marvel blockbuster schlock at unprecedented levels, but actual filmmaking is probably fine, if they ever go back to that.
Hollywood’s been dead for thirty years. Can one fucker with AI do worse than Steven Mnuchin? Who gives a shit.
