In the year 2025, Hollywood approached artificial intelligence with nothing good to offer

Artificial intelligence is not new to Hollywood, but this was the year it really made its presence felt. For years now, the entertainment industry has used different types of generative AI products for a variety of post-production processes from de-aging actors to removing green screen backgrounds. In many cases, technology has been a useful tool for human artists tasked with arduous, painstaking work that would otherwise take an extremely long time to complete. But in 2025, Hollywood is already accepting this idea To deploy the kind of artificial intelligence that is only really good for him Convert text to video Which doesn’t have all of these practical uses in a traditional production workflow. Despite all the money and effort put into it, there’s still no AGI project that shows why it’s worth all the hype.

The meeting of Hollywood and artificial intelligence was not initially very rosy. Studios have been in a privileged position to sue the companies behind this technology because their video production models have clearly been trained on copyrighted intellectual property. A number of major production companies including Disney, Universaland Warner Bros. Discovery Lawsuits have been filed against AI companies and their backers for this very reason. But instead of bashing AI providers into the ground, some of Hollywood’s biggest players have chosen to sleep with them. We’re only just beginning to see what can come from this new era of AGI partnerships, however All signs point to Things are going to get a lot dirtier in the very near future.

Although many of this year’s titles were dominated by AI Bigger outfits like Google and OpenAIWe also saw a number of younger players competing for a seat at the entertainment table. There was AstraeaNatasha Lyonne’s startup focused on Developing film projects with “ethical” architecture. Video generation models, and Startups like Showrunnerthat Platform powered by Amazon Designed to allow subscribers to create animated “shows” (a very generous term) from a few descriptive sentences plugged into Discord. These relatively new companies were all desperate to legitimize the idea that their flavor of AI could be used to enhance film and television development while lowering overall production costs.

Asteria didn’t have anything more than hype to share with the public after announcing its first film, and it was hard to believe that regular people would be interested in paying for the shoddy, cobbled-together knockoffs of Showrunner made by actual animators. In the latter case, it seemed like Showrunner’s real goal was to secure exciting partnerships with established studios like Disney that would lead to their technology being integrated into platforms where users could create custom content featuring iconic characters from huge franchises.

This idea seemed somewhat ridiculous when Showrunner first came on the scene because its models produce the modern equivalent of old JibJab cartoons. But in time, Disney made it clear that it was interested in experimenting with this type of content, since text-to-video generators tend to be into anything beyond quick memes. In December, Disney has entered into a three-year, $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI This will allow Sora users to create AI videos featuring 200 different characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and more.

Netflix has become one of the first big studios to proudly announce that it will go all-in on AI generation. After using technology To produce special effects for one of its original seriesstreamer Published a list of general guidelines She wanted her partners to follow suit if they planned to jump on the ramp wagon, too. Although Netflix was not mandating that filmmakers use new-generation AI, it explained that saving money on visual effects work was one of the main reasons it came out to support the trend. It wasn’t long before Amazon followed suit by releasing several Japanese anime series Terribly translated into other languages Because the dubbing process did not involve any human translators or voice actors.

Amazon’s AI generations have become a shining example of how poorly this technology performs. They also highlighted that some studios aren’t putting all that much effort into making sure their AI-derived projects are polished enough to release to the public. This was true too Automatically generated Amazon TV summarieswhich often got details about various shows very wrong. Each of these failures made it seem as if Amazon somehow thought people wouldn’t notice or care about its AI’s inability to consistently generate high-quality output. The studio quickly pulled its AI-dubbed series and recap feature, but made no mention that it wouldn’t try that kind of nonsense again.

All this and more Stupid stunts like AI “actress” Tilly Norwood It made it seem like certain sectors of the entertainment industry were becoming more comfortable with trying to force AI “entertainment” on people even though it left a lot of people unaffected and very put off. None of these projects has made clear to the public why anyone except cash-strapping CEOs (and people who worship them for some reason) should be excited about the future shaped by this technology.

Aside from some unimpressive images, we still haven’t seen what might come from some of these collaborations, like Disney teasing OpenAI. But the presence of artificial intelligence in Hollywood will be more evident next year. Disney plans to devote an entire section of its streaming service to user-generated content sourced from Sora, and will encourage Disney employees to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT products. But the real significance of the deal at this current moment is the message it sends to other studios about how to move as Hollywood enters its declining era.

Regardless of whether Disney thinks this will work well, the studio has indicated that it doesn’t want to be left behind if AI adoption continues to accelerate. This tells other production houses that they should follow suit, and if that becomes the case, there’s no telling how much of this stuff we’ll all have to endure.