Given how good the latest generation of AI video-generation software has become, it is getting increasingly difficult to believe that AI-generated video is going to remain a novelty confined to TikTok, advertising experiments and people making surreal videos of raccoons running restaurants.
At some point—and probably sooner than the entertainment industry would prefer—these systems are going to begin eating into the market for human-produced television, commercials and music videos.
I suspect it will take a little longer than the most enthusiastic AI evangelists think. Perhaps eighteen months rather than a few months. There are still enormous practical problems involved in producing a coherent piece of entertainment: maintaining character consistency across dozens or hundreds of shots, keeping a story visually coherent, controlling performances, revising individual scenes without accidentally changing everything around them, and producing something at the length and reliability demanded by professional television and film production.
But those are engineering problems, not necessarily fundamental barriers.
And the trajectory is becoming difficult to ignore. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5, for example, is pushing toward 30-second continuous generations with large numbers of reference inputs and increasingly sophisticated control over scenes. Google’s Veo 3.1 can generate video with synchronized dialogue, sound effects and ambient audio while providing controls for camera movement, reference images, scene extension and other aspects of filmmaking. Runway’s Gen-4.5 and Kling 3.0 are part of the same rapidly advancing ecosystem.
The important thing is not that any one of these systems can currently generate an entire episode of The Sopranos from a paragraph of text. They can’t. The important thing is that the amount of traditionally expensive human labor required to create convincing moving images is steadily being reduced.
That distinction matters enormously.
A music video, for example, is already a remarkably good target for generative AI. It is usually relatively short. It can be highly stylized. It does not necessarily require a complicated narrative. Visuals can be edited around a pre-existing piece of music. And perhaps most importantly, music videos have historically been an area where directors have been encouraged to experiment with surreal imagery and visual effects that would be difficult or expensive to produce conventionally.
The same is true of commercials. If an advertising agency can generate fifty possible versions of a thirty-second commercial, rapidly iterate on them and then produce the final version without hiring a production company, renting a location, assembling a crew, hiring actors and spending days shooting footage, the economic incentive is obvious.
Television may take somewhat longer, but even here the pressure is substantial. Episodic television is fundamentally an industrial process. It requires repeatable production, predictable budgets and enormous amounts of content. If AI can eventually handle even a significant percentage of the visual production pipeline, the economics begin to change dramatically.
And then we get to movies.
By the end of this decade, I would be surprised if we couldn’t watch feature-length movies in which a substantial majority of the images were generated by AI. Whether those movies will be good is another question entirely. But the technical possibility seems increasingly plausible.
This raises a fascinating question: what kinds of movies will be the first to become predominantly AI-generated?
My initial instinct would have been the small independent film. After all, independent filmmakers are constantly constrained by money. If AI allows a filmmaker with a laptop and a good screenplay to create convincing locations, visual effects, crowds, vehicles, creatures and even entire environments without paying for them, that would seem like an obvious democratization of filmmaking.
But I’m no longer convinced that the indie film will necessarily be the ultimate winner.
There is an equally compelling argument that AI will first transform the most formulaic parts of Hollywood.
Think about the enormous number of movies that exist because the entertainment industry has discovered that audiences reliably respond to certain combinations of genre, character, spectacle and story. Superhero movies. Action franchises. Romantic comedies. Young-adult adaptations. Animated family movies. Horror franchises. Christmas movies. Movies about talking animals. Movies about talking animals that are secretly superheroes.
Hollywood has spent decades trying to industrialize the production of these things.
AI could take that industrialization to its logical extreme.
Instead of a studio spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating a single enormously expensive spectacle, imagine being able to generate something functionally equivalent for a fraction of the cost. Imagine being able to create twenty different versions of a scene and choose the best one. Imagine being able to change the ethnicity, age or appearance of a character without reshooting the movie. Imagine being able to replace an actor’s performance, change the weather, move the location or rewrite a scene after production has supposedly ended.
At that point, the traditional distinction between “production” and “post-production” starts to collapse.
And that is where things could get really weird.
The economics of filmmaking have historically been based on scarcity. Cameras are expensive. Sets are expensive. Actors are expensive. Locations are expensive. Special effects are expensive. Large crews are expensive. Time is expensive. Generative AI attacks almost every one of those assumptions simultaneously. The result might not simply be cheaper Hollywood movies. It could be an entertainment industry in which the concept of a “movie” itself changes.
Imagine a future in which you don’t simply watch Star Wars 17. Instead, your AI generates your version of the movie. Maybe you want the space battles to be more prominent. Maybe you want the romantic subplot to be expanded. Maybe you want the movie to be darker. Maybe you want the villain to win. Maybe you want a particular actor’s licensed digital likeness playing the lead.
At that point, Hollywood isn’t really making movies anymore. It is making entertainment universes and licensing the ingredients from which movies are generated.
That sounds ridiculous now. It may not sound ridiculous in ten years. And there is an even more disruptive possibility: AI doesn’t necessarily have to produce movies that look like today’s movies.
Once the cost of generating visual content approaches the cost of generating text, the amount of entertainment that can exist becomes effectively limitless. Instead of thousands of movies being released every year, there could be millions—or billions—of personalized pieces of audiovisual entertainment.
That would create an extraordinarily strange economic problem. If entertainment becomes almost infinitely abundant, the scarce resource may no longer be production. It may be attention. And this is where I think live entertainment becomes particularly interesting.
I’ve increasingly wondered whether Broadway, live theater, concerts and other forms of physical performance could end up being among the biggest beneficiaries of the AI revolution.
The reason is simple: AI can generate an astonishingly convincing simulation of a performance on a screen. But that is precisely what makes the physical experience of watching actual human beings perform potentially more valuable.
There is something fundamentally different about sitting in a theater with several hundred other people and watching human beings standing in front of you, knowing that what happens onstage is actually happening.
The actor could forget a line. The audience could laugh at the wrong moment. Someone could drop a prop. An actor could improvise. The performance could be slightly different tomorrow night. Those imperfections are not bugs. They are part of the experience.
The more synthetic and infinitely reproducible digital entertainment becomes, the more valuable irreproducible experiences may become.
This could produce a strange reversal.
For most of the history of entertainment, technology has progressively made performances less dependent on physical presence. Photography captured images. Film captured performances. Television brought them into people’s homes. Streaming eliminated the need for physical media.
AI could take that process almost to its logical endpoint: entertainment that doesn’t merely reproduce a performance but generates one on demand.
And then, paradoxically, the thing that becomes valuable is the performance that cannot be generated on demand. The human actor standing onstage. The band playing in front of you. The audience sitting around you. The knowledge that this particular performance is happening once, at this particular time, in this particular place, and then it is gone.
So I don’t necessarily think the arrival of AI-generated movies means the end of entertainment. It might mean the end of the entertainment business as we currently understand it.
Hollywood has spent a century figuring out how to manufacture scarcity around enormously expensive audiovisual productions. Generative AI may eventually make the manufacturing part of that equation dramatically cheaper.
And when production becomes cheap, something else has to become scarce. Maybe it will be human attention. Maybe it will be trusted brands and characters. Maybe it will be celebrity likenesses. Maybe it will be truly great writers and directors. Or maybe it will be something much older and simpler:
Being in a room with other human beings while something happens that cannot happen exactly the same way again.
Which, if that turns out to be the future, would mean that the most technologically advanced entertainment revolution in human history could end up giving us a renewed appreciation for something as technologically primitive as Broadway.
Lulz.
Hollywood might finally be defeated by theater.
