AI isn’t new to Hollywood — however this was the 12 months when it actually made its presence felt. For years now, the leisure business has used totally different sorts of generative AI merchandise for quite a lot of post-production processes starting from de-aging actors to eradicating inexperienced display screen backgrounds. In lots of cases, the expertise has been a useful gizmo for human artists tasked with tedious and painstaking labor that may have in any other case taken them inordinate quantities of time to finish. However in 2025, Hollywood really began warming to the idea of deploying the type of gen AI that’s actually solely good for conjuring up text-to-video slop that doesn’t have all that many sensible makes use of in conventional manufacturing workflows. Regardless of the entire cash and energy being put into it, there’s but to be a gen-AI challenge that has proven why it’s value the entire hype.
This confluence of Hollywood and AI didn’t begin out so rosy. Studios have been in a major place to take the businesses behind this expertise to courtroom as a result of their video era fashions had clearly been skilled on copyrighted mental property. Numerous main manufacturing corporations together with Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery did file lawsuits in opposition to AI companies and their boosters for that very cause. However fairly than pummeling AI purveyors into the bottom, a few of Hollywood’s greatest energy gamers selected as an alternative to get into mattress with them. We now have solely simply begun to see what can come from this new period of gen-AI partnerships, however all signs point to issues getting a lot sloppier within the very close to future.
Although a lot of this 12 months’s gen-AI headlines have been dominated by larger outfits like Google and OpenAI, we additionally noticed various smaller gamers vying for a seat on the leisure desk. There was Asteria, Natasha Lyonne’s startup centered on developing film projects with “ethically” engineered video era fashions, and startups like Showrunner, an Amazon-backed platform designed to let subscribers create animated “reveals” (a really beneficiant time period) from just some descriptive sentences plugged into Discord. These comparatively new corporations have been all determined to legitimize the concept that their taste of gen AI might be used to supercharge movie / TV growth whereas bringing down general manufacturing prices.
Asteria didn’t have something greater than hype to share with the general public after asserting its first movie, and it was arduous to imagine that ordinary individuals could be concerned with paying for Showrunner’s shoddily cobbled-together knockoffs of reveals made by precise animators. Within the latter case, it felt very very similar to Showrunner’s actual purpose was to safe juicy partnerships with established studios like Disney that might result in their tech being baked into platforms the place customers might immediate up bespoke content material that includes recognizable characters from large franchises.
That concept appeared pretty ridiculous when Showrunner first hit the scene as a result of its fashions churn out the trendy equal of clunky JibJab cartoons. However in due time, Disney made it clear that — crappy as text-to-video turbines are usually for something past fast memes — it was concerned with experimenting with that type of content material. In December, Disney entered into a three-year, billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI that might let Sora customers make AI movies with 200 totally different characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and extra.
Netflix grew to become one of many first massive studios to proudly announce that it was going all-in on gen AI. After utilizing the expertise to produce special effects for one of its original series, the streamer published a list of general guidelines it wished its companions to comply with in the event that they deliberate to leap on the slop bandwagon as properly. Although Netflix wasn’t mandating that filmmakers use gen AI, it made clear that saving cash on VFX work was one of many important causes it was popping out in help of the development. And it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Amazon adopted go well with by releasing a number of Japanese anime sequence that have been terribly localized into other languages as a result of the dubbing course of didn’t contain any human translators or voice actors.
Amazon’s gen-AI dubs grew to become a shining instance of how poorly this expertise can carry out. In addition they highlighted how some studios aren’t placing all that a lot effort into ensuring that their gen AI-derived tasks are polished sufficient to be launched to the general public. That was additionally true of Amazon’s machine-generated TV recaps, which incessantly acquired particulars about totally different reveals very flawed. Each of those fiascos made it appear as if Amazon someway thought that folks wouldn’t discover or care about AI’s incapability to persistently generate high-quality outputs. The studio rapidly pulled its AI-dubbed sequence and the recap characteristic down, but it surely didn’t say that it wouldn’t strive this type of nonsense once more.
All of this and different dumb stunts like AI “actress” Tilly Norwood made it really feel like sure segments of the leisure business have been changing into extra snug making an attempt to foist gen-AI “leisure” on individuals despite the fact that it left many individuals deeply unimpressed and postpone. None of those tasks demonstrated to the general public why anybody aside from money-pinching execs (and individuals who worship them for some cause) could be excited by a future formed by this expertise.
Except for a number of unimpressive photographs, we nonetheless haven’t seen what all would possibly come from a few of these collaborations, like Disney cozying as much as OpenAI. However subsequent 12 months AI’s presence in Hollywood might be much more pronounced. Disney plans to dedicate a whole part of its streaming service to user-generated content material sourced from Sora, and it’ll encourage Disney workers to make use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT merchandise. However the deal’s actual significance on this present second is the message it sends to different studios about how they need to transfer as Hollywood enters its slop period.
No matter whether or not Disney thinks it will work out properly, the studio has signaled that it doesn’t wish to be left behind if AI adoption retains accelerating. That tells different manufacturing homes that they need to comply with go well with, and if that turns into the case, there’s no telling how rather more of these things we’re all going to be pressured to endure.