AI Is Rewriting Hollywoods Script

From iPhone to Cinema: The New Wave of AI Filmmaking

In a Culver City Starbucks, Amit Jain, co-founder of Silicon Valley's Luma AI, demonstrates the future. On his iPad, a video shows an employee comically pretending to be a monkey. With a swipe, the scene is transformed: the employee is now a photorealistic monkey, rendered in seconds. "The tagline for this would be, like, iPhone to cinema," Jain says, acknowledging the technology's potential to fundamentally disrupt Hollywood. If anyone can create cinematic magic with a few taps, what is the purpose of the industry that once held a monopoly on it?

Luma's generative AI platform, Dream Machine, represents a new paradigm in moviemaking. Users can generate release-quality footage from a simple text prompt, like "a cowboy riding a velociraptor through Times Square." Its latest feature, Modify Video, allows users to redraw existing footage—turning a hoodie into a superhero cape or a sunny day into a blizzard—all without a green screen or a VFX team. While clips are currently limited to about ten seconds due to heavy computing demands, Jain notes, "The average shot in a movie is only eight seconds."

Jain’s ultimate vision is even more transformative: a world of fully personalized entertainment generated on demand. Instead of mass-market blockbusters, imagine a comedy about your coworkers or a sci-fi epic starring a digital version of you. He aims to make it possible to generate two hours of video for every person, every day. To achieve this, the technology must become vastly cheaper and more intelligent. "Currently, pretty much all video generative models, including ours, are quite dumb," Jain admits. "At the end of the day, we need to build general intelligence that can tell a f— funny joke. Everything else is a distraction."

This vision, reminiscent of MIT's earlier Nightmare Machine experiment which taught AI to be scary, is seen by many in Hollywood as its own kind of nightmare—a future where traditional cinema is replaced by fast, frictionless, and disposable content.

A Tale of Two Valleys: Hollywood's Divided Response

Silicon Valley frames the rise of AI as progress, but in Hollywood, it often feels like an existential threat to authorship, jobs, and tradition. This tension was a central theme of the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, where picket signs declared "AI is not art."

What was once science fiction is now a daily reality. The entertainment ecosystem is scrambling to adapt, with some seeing incredible potential for faster production and creative freedom, while others fear an extraction machine that will flood the world with cheap, soulless content. Early resistance is already forming, with protests like "Kill the Machine" being organized against screenings of AI-generated films.

Despite the backlash, the industry's gravity is shifting toward Silicon Valley. Facing budget cuts and shareholder pressure, major studios are turning to AI not just to cut costs, but to survive. Netflix used AI to rapidly complete a complex VFX sequence for "El Eternauta." At Paramount, new chief executive David Ellison, whose Skydance Media recently completed its merger with the studio, is pushing for a "studio in the cloud" that leverages AI at every stage of filmmaking. Meanwhile, Lionsgate has partnered with the startup Runway to train a custom AI model on its film library to streamline development.

Legacy studios like Paramount are exploring ways to bring down costs by incorporating AI into their pipeline. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Most studios are proceeding with caution, quietly experimenting with AI for character design or script development while trying to avoid the appearance of automating creativity. The prevailing sentiment is that while AI is a powerful tool, it should not replace the human heart of storytelling.

The AI-Native Studio: A New Hollywood Model

While legacy studios adapt, a new breed of smaller, AI-native studios is emerging. Since 2022, over 65 such studios have launched, using AI to slash production costs by up to 95%. This trend collapses the boundaries between artist and technician, challenging Hollywood's traditional role as a gatekeeper and raising profound questions about ownership, compensation, and the very meaning of a story in an era of infinite, remixable content.

Yves Bergquist of USC’s Entertainment Technology Center notes that legacy studios are making "aggressive efforts behind the scenes" to prepare for this shift by building knowledge graphs and data governance policies. However, the transition is painful. "This is 22nd-century technology being used to solve 21st-century problems inside 19th-century organizational models," Bergquist says. To help studios navigate this new landscape, his startup Corto uses AI to analyze cultural trends and audience preferences, providing insights into what emotional arcs and aesthetics will resonate with specific demographics.

Bergquist envisions a future of personalized entertainment where studios can subtly fine-tune stories for different viewers. Amazon MGM Studios' head of technology innovation, Danae Kokenos, echoes this, seeing personalization and interactivity as key opportunities. While acknowledging public fear of AI, Bergquist believes that if harnessed correctly, AI will lead to a "rebirth of Hollywood" focused on immersive, multi-platform experiences.

Creative Liberation or a Flood of AI Slop?

The internet is rife with "Hollywood is dead" declarations, fueled by the rise of generative AI. Hollywood produces about 15,000 hours of content annually, a figure dwarfed by the 300 million hours uploaded to YouTube each year. In this context, AI's sheer volume poses a disruptive threat. As the monoculture fades, Hollywood's cultural influence is waning; this year's Oscars drew fewer viewers than a typical 1990s episode of "Murder, She Wrote."

This content deluge has given rise to a new term: "slop," a catchall for cheap, low-effort, algorithmically generated media. The fear is that AI will trap audiences in an algorithmic bubble, feeding them endless variations of what they already like. However, some argue this is not so different from Hollywood's current output, where nine of the top ten box office hits in 2024 were sequels.

Audience members watch an AI-assisted animated short at a 2023 Sony Pictures screening, offering a glimpse into the new wave of AI-powered filmmaking. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Joaquin Cuenca, CEO of Freepik, rejects the term "slop," arguing that AI tools empower people with limited skills to express their ideas and even launch businesses. His company's technology was used in Robert Zemeckis’s film “Here” and a short film anthology mentored by Danny Boyle called “Beyond the Loop.” In response to the debate, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has stated that while AI tools won't disqualify a film, nominations will depend on "the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship."

The Collaborative Future: Reinventing the Studio

At a historic L.A. studio complex, a new model is taking shape with Asteria, the generative AI video studio founded by filmmaker Bryn Mooser. As the creative arm of AI company Moonvalley, Asteria is built on the idea that AI can expand human creativity. Mooser, a two-time Oscar nominee, sees AI as the latest in a long line of technological reinventions in Hollywood, from sound to CGI.

Ed Ulbrich, Bryn Mooser, and Mateusz Malinowski, executives at Moonvalley and Asteria, are building a new kind of AI-powered movie studio. (David Butow / For the Times)

Crucially, Moonvalley's approach is designed to be legally sound. Unlike many AI companies that scrape content from the web, Moonvalley built its video model on fully licensed material, a key distinction as studios like Disney and Universal file copyright lawsuits against platforms like Midjourney. This ethical approach has drawn interest from high-profile filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Darren Aronofsky, who are advising or launching their own AI ventures.

Still, not every AI project is met with enthusiasm. Director Natasha Lyonne's announcement of her AI-assisted feature debut, "Uncanny Valley," drew backlash over concerns it would diminish human authorship. Mooser believes the path forward is collaboration. "The way forward isn’t everybody typing prompts," he says. "It’s putting great filmmakers in the room with the best engineers and solving this together."

New Formats New Storytellers

For over a century, filmmaking has been a one-way street. Stephen Piron's startup Pickford AI is trying to change that by creating stories that unfold in real time, shaped by the audience. In their demo, an animated dating show, viewers type suggestions and vote on ideas, which an AI then uses to write and render the next scene on the spot. "We wanted to see if we could bring the vibe of the crowd back into the show," Piron says. The goal is a collaborative storytelling forum that makes the experience feel more like live theater.

Attendees at the AI on the Lot conference, where Pickford AI screened a demo of its interactive dating show. (Irina Logra)

Other startups are also blurring the line between creator and consumer. Fable Studio's Showrunner platform, pitched as "the Netflix of AI," lets users generate animated TV episodes from prompts. Meanwhile, Invisible Universe is bypassing studios entirely, developing new animated characters and IP directly with fans on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Is AI the Villain of Hollywoods Next Chapter?

Filmmakers have long warned of the dangers of intelligent machines, from HAL 9000 to the Terminator. In his 2023 film "The Creator," director Gareth Edwards flipped this script, casting humans as the aggressors in a war against AI. The story follows a soldier sent to destroy a new AI weapon, only to discover it's an android child.

In Gareth Edwards’ 2023 film “The Creator,” a young AI child holds the key to humanity’s future. (20th Century)

Despite being an original, visually inventive film, "The Creator" had a modest box office run. Its release coincided with the actors' strikes, when public anxiety about AI was at its peak, and a story sympathetic to AI struggled to find its audience. Edwards, who has since directed the blockbuster “Jurassic World Rebirth,” remains optimistic, comparing AI to the invention of the electric guitar. He poses a simple question about the technology's future impact: "Either it will be mediocre rubbish—and if that’s true, don’t worry about it, it’s not a threat—or it’s going to be phenomenal, and who wouldn’t want to see that?"