I think it's finally starting to really hit Hollywood just how in trouble it actually is.
Artificial Intelligence is encroaching on Tinseltown quietly, and I do mean quietly. As The Hollywood Reporter reported on Tuesday, unnamed and uncredited work is a natural part of the movie-making process, and AI is already becoming one of those ghost entities being used to help write and improve the things you see on screen.
This "invisible labor" however, has always been costly and come with complications of their own. However, AI requires no attribution. It doesn't ask for payment. It's the perfect "tool."
And it's here that Hollywood is seeing AI's qualities. It's cheaper and reliable, and that means it can start slashing budgets in massive ways. Moreover, modern methods for credit attribution make people care less who actually made what they're watching, allowing AI to become a larger player without too much fuss.
THR's Remy Blumenfeld is sounding the alarm:
Today, it is not political ideology that drives invisibility. It is convenience. Generative tools let studios pretend that fewer people are involved. Fewer names to credit. Fewer residuals to pay. The assistant becomes the final pass. The designer becomes a prompt operator. The writer becomes the person who just helped out.
Streaming platforms have only accelerated this erosion of visibility. In the name of user experience, they have truncated title sequences, eliminated credit scrolls and hidden production information behind menus no casual viewer will ever click through. In many cases, the audience never sees who made what — and that, increasingly, feels like the point.
This is not technophobia. It is memory. Credit is how we record history — who touched the work, who shaped the story. Strip the names away, and the work loses its lineage. The line between human and machine begins to blur. Not because the machine is so smart, but because we stopped pointing to the people.
Hollywood studios are indeed gearing up to let the human element of production go quietly into that goodnight as AI continues to accelerate in capability. Blumenfeld's following words are haunting:
And if those people are replaced, or folded into the shadows, or quietly cut out of the process, we are not looking at evolution. We are looking at erasure.
Studios have always known how to simplify credit. That is what the auteur myth was built for — to turn a cacophony of effort into a single, salable signature. Now AI allows them to do it at scale. Without negotiation. Without names. Without cost.
It is not collaboration. It is erasure disguised as efficiency.
Hollywood is staring down the barrel of an extinction event.
And it all boils down to money. AI is allowing these studios to slash the money they spend on production by incredible amounts. James Cameron predicted that AI could slash VFX costs by half and make workflows faster.
Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed they used AI to create a scene involving a collapsing building in The Eternaut at ten times the normal speed and at very little cost.
Almost a year ago, Lionsgate signed a huge deal with Runway, an AI company that is forecasted to save studios "millions and millions of dollars."
The press around it is that this will actually save Hollywood because inflated production costs have plagued the industry for years now, costing studios hundreds of millions of dollars that it never gets back. To be clear, VFX costs are insanely high, but that includes overpaid actors as well, some of whom are walking away with a small country's GDP for acting in a movie that will never earn those costs at the box office.
You're naive if you think studio executives aren't already thinking "... what if I didn't have to pay these people at all?"
To be honest, it's a smart though to have if you're a businessman trying to make piles of cash in an industry where egos, unions, and complications plague the books, and I imagine SAG-AFTRA isn't going to take AI's intrusion lying down. They've been moving to protect actors from AI being used to mimic or alter their likeness, but VFX artists aren't exactly protected from AI replacing them.
Studios haven't done it yet, but they can. I think fear of backlash from the unions and possibly audiences keeps them from going pedal to the metal with it.
But that's not stopping you and me.
As I write this, Veo3 from Google allows me to create storyboard elements and generate realistic video with nothing but a prompt. I've used it more than a few times in my YouTube videos to make a point, especially in the one about AI women disrupting real-life relationships between men and women. The only trouble was that character models could never be static.
That changed just a handful of days ago.
Now I can create static characters across shots without having to retrain the model. I can create scenes that utilize different angles without having to worry about the model forgetting what character or characters we're working with. With this new tech available to the people, Hollywood's AI issue just grew exponentially.
A few more quality of life tweaks and UI advancements, and little Timmy will be able to create full-length blockbusters after homework with nothing but prompts, stills, and his parent's credit card.
That is, at the time, all that's truly holding back the vast majority of us. Veo3 video creation is expensive for most people, but as the technology advances, even that will become far cheaper with some websites with their own Veo3 tech simply requiring a subscription.
I've been the guy standing on Hollywood's corner with the "End Is Nigh" sandwich board for some time now, and my predictions are all coming true, and about as fast as I predicted. So I'll make one more.
In another two years, studios will be competing with you, not with each other. Unless something drastic steps in and changes things like laws or heavy-handed AI regulations that would likely be doomed to fail in the Supreme Court anyway, AI is going to destroy Hollywood.
