Being that we’re in the throes of another go-nowhere AI hype cycle, people are crawling out of the trough to declare entertainment dead because people can just use Sora to generate all the entertainment they need. Remember Sora? We’re all still having fun with Sora, right? After a pearl-clutching week of videos featuring a pregnant Sam Altman saying racial slurs, people got bored and returned to actual entertainment. Nevertheless, now that a 15-second AI-generated video depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt sparring in a gray void is going viral, it’s once again “over” for Hollywood.
Posted by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, whose 2002 short film Fifty Percent Grey was nominated for an Oscar, the clip has been circulating on X, the Everything App and hotbed of AI-generated revenge porn and CSAM, where AI continues to wow people and bots with incredibly low standards. “This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2,” Robinson wrote. “If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk.” Seedance 2 is a new video-generating app from the folks at ByteDance, the creators of TikTok, who were recently banned from doing business in America but apparently can still pillage Hollywood IP for slop. Amid replacing avatars with zombies and robots that looked equally uninspired, Robinson continued to allege that “streamers are not disclosing their AI use in shows you are already watching and didn’t know you were supposed to hate,” which might account for the sharp decline in quality in most streaming shows.
One person who agrees that it might be time for Hollywood’s best and brightest actors, writers, directors, stunt coordinators, and VFX artists to pack it in is Deadpool & Wolverine screenwriter Rhett Reese, who retweeted Robinson’s post with the caption, “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.” When a fan rightly pointed out that the video “looks like shit,” Reese replied with the oft-repeated Russo-brother dream that very soon “one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases.” It’s the same talking-point AI boosters, including the Russos, have been, well, boosting for years. Every few months, a video like this comes along, and we hear another round of predictions that AI will be the only form of entertainment, because people want a carbon copy of someone else’s idea, such as a Wachowski-directed fight scene reskinned with today’s youngest 60-year-old action stars.
“To clarify: I am not at all excited about AI encroaching into creative endeavors. To the contrary, I’m terrified,” Reese continued. “So many people I love are facing the loss of careers they love. I myself am at risk. When I wrote ‘It’s over,’ I didn’t mean it to sound cavalier or flippant. I was blown away by the Pitt v Cruise video because it is so professional. That’s exactly why I’m scared. My glass-half-empty view is that Hollywood is about to be revolutionized/decimated. If you truly think the Pitt v Cruise video is unimpressive slop, you’ve got nothing to worry about. But I’m shook.”
Unimpressive slop or the death knell of Hollywood? That is the question. Four years ago, Joe Russo, who sits on the board of several AI companies, told Variety, “Filmmaking is going to transform into some other medium […] I don’t know what that media is going to be. My guess is that when you can sit in your house, turn to one of the actors that is standing in front of you and say, ‘Hey, Tom Cruise, hold on a second. Tell me about how you filmed this scene,’ and the AI-fueled Tom Cruise can turn to you and start explaining, it’s over at that point, right? That’s when technology will dominate whatever new form of storytelling is coming.” It was a turnkey moment that seemed to explain what happens to Hollywood creatives who spend too much time in the Marvel machine. Maybe all those years of crunching VFX artists to dust and valuing IP over artists, Marvel’s most successful creators wish for a way to dispose of them altogether. Or maybe he’s right. After all, Doug Liman’s new movie about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin is opting for AI locations and AI actor adjustments instead of doing reshoots that would require star Pete Davidson to leave his basement. Still, we have to admit, using AI for a Bitcoin movie is kind of the perfect marriage of form and content.