{"id":777,"date":"2026-05-01T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/01\/im-a-hollywood-writer-its-not-over-for-us\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T11:00:00","slug":"im-a-hollywood-writer-its-not-over-for-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/01\/im-a-hollywood-writer-its-not-over-for-us\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m a Hollywood Writer. It\u2019s Not Over for Us"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tBack in February, Hollywood received a message from the future: \u201cI hate to say it, but it\u2019s likely over for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tThis came from\u00a0Wolverine & Deadpool<\/em>\u00a0screenwriter Rhett Reese in response to a clip posted on Twitter by the Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson.\u00a0The AI<\/a>-generated video, as you\u2019ve almost certainly seen, depicted a fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise atop what appeared to be a Roman ruin set somewhat perplexingly against the New York City skyline.<\/p>\n

\tThe clip seemed to represent a huge leap forward in AI-generated video, with high production values and realistic facial expression and movement.\u00a0It\u00a0looked<\/em>\u00a0like a movie.\u00a0An expensive one.\u00a0While some commenters were critical, the quality of the video represented a quantum leap forward from the famously crude early AI videos depicting Will Smith eating spaghetti.<\/p>\n

\tAnyone who extrapolated that progress into the future could see that it wouldn\u2019t be long \u2014 a year, months,\u00a0weeks<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 before anyone could generate movies on their home computer that once cost $200M or more at no cost.\u00a0For screenwriters like Mr. Reese and myself, and for everyone else who earns their living in our business, the prognosis seemed clear:\u00a0It\u2019s over for us.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\tOr is it?\u00a0Because the question, I think, isn\u2019t what AI can create.\u00a0The question is whether anyone will watch it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tOne harbinger of the paradigm shift we\u2019re going through \u2014 not just in the entertainment industry but across our entire culture \u2014 took place May 11, 1997, when chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to IBM\u2019s Deep Blue.\u00a0At that point, Kasparov was the greatest chess player in human history, with an ELO rating of 2800, but after that loss, computers left human beings behind and never looked back. To any observer on that day, it would seem that chess, or chess played by human beings, was over.\u00a0The future would be computers playing other computers.<\/p>\n

\tBut that\u2019s not what happened.\u00a0Competitive chess \u2014\u00a0human<\/em>\u00a0chess \u2014 is thriving.\u00a0Magnus Carlsen is a global celebrity.\u00a0Chess has made him wealthier than any player before him, and YouTubers like Hikaru Nakamura earn as much as Carlsen.\u00a0Chess is an industry in a way that it never was in 1997.\u00a0Meanwhile, there is a much smaller community of people who design AI chess engines and pit them against one another in what I like to imagine as\u00a0Fight Club<\/em>-style contests held in basements.\u00a0The AI chess bots are now vastly better than any human player who has ever lived, but \u2014 and this is important \u2014\u00a0nobody cares about them.<\/em><\/p>\n

\tHuman beings are social animals.\u00a0We care about what other human beings do.\u00a0We don\u2019t really care that much about what machines can do.\u00a0We take it as a given that they can do things we can\u2019t \u2014 after all, that\u2019s why we made them.\u00a0But they don\u2019t interest us the way other humans do.<\/p>\n

\tImagine you\u2019re a tennis fan and that in the future Netflix\u2019s algorithm is able to generate tennis matches custom-designed to your taste.\u00a0You can watch a new, spectacular, nail-biting match between AI Carlos Alcaraz and AI Novak Djokovic every day.\u00a0Would you watch that channel?\u00a0Of course not.\u00a0You don\u2019t care about AI Novak Djokovic.\u00a0To be a sports fan is not merely to be invested in the spectacle of sports but in the human drama of it: the contest between a young player on his way up against an older one trying for one last title.\u00a0We feel we know these people, and what\u2019s crucial to the drama of that parasocial relationship is that they are real human beings, testing real human limits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tWe care about the real Novak Djokovic because he\u2019s a 38-year-old man seemingly doing the impossible \u2014 just as we care about the real Tom Cruise performing his own stunts because he\u2019s a 63-year-old man doing the impossible.<\/p>\n

\tNow imagine you\u2019re a movie fan.\u00a0Netflix\u2019s algorithm detects that you loved\u00a0Sentimental Value<\/em>, so it creates a channel that auto-generates a new Joachim Trier movie for you every day.\u00a0Would you watch it?\u00a0Probably not.\u00a0Because you\u2019re interested in what Joachim Trier has to say and how he\u2019s choosing to say it.\u00a0You have a parasocial relationship with him and his actors, even if you\u2019re walking into the theater for the first time and you\u2019ve never seen one of his movies before.\u00a0He\u2019s a human being trying to communicate something to you, and that communication is part of a broader cultural conversation that takes place over tables at restaurants and parties and on Twitter. And if human beings aren\u2019t involved,\u00a0we don\u2019t care.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tTo be sure, not all entertainment is auteur cinema, and not everybody cares whether what they\u2019re watching was human-made.\u00a0Would a 3-year-old know or care whether Teletubbies<\/em> was made by AI? Probably not, and this has implications for children\u2019s programming.\u00a0And future generations of kids raised on AI programming \u2014 \u201cAI natives\u201d\u00a0\u2014 will likely be less discriminating about whether their entertainment is AI- or human-made.\u00a0There\u2019s a whole stratum of \u201ccommodity TV\u201d where the consumer just wants something on in the background, and we should assume that there will be a sort of cultural creep as AI slop becomes more pervasive and starts moving up the entertainment food chain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tReese worries that very soon, \u201ca person will be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood releases.\u201d\u00a0But this medium has existed as long as cinema itself \u2014 it\u2019s called animation.\u00a0We may be on the verge of an era of photorealistic animation, but that won\u2019t necessarily crowd out live-action filmmaking any more than Pixar did.\u00a0Tellingly, animation has never tried to perfectly replicate what live-action can do: instead, it does what live-action can\u2019t.\u00a0And in all great animation, from Chuck Jones to Hayao Miyazaki to\u00a0Wall-E<\/em>, the human touch is palpable in every frame, because human audiences demand it.<\/p>\n

\tThe AI filmmaker of the future will have to create something enormously original and distinctive to rise above the ocean of zero-cost AI slop that will soon be out there.\u00a0If anything, the bar will be higher for AI filmmakers than live-action filmmakers in terms of voice and originality.\u00a0The \u201cAI Chris Nolan\u201d that Reese predicts will have to be very, very distinctive in order to avoid being instantly duplicated by legions of roving AI agents cloning whatever movie just dropped.<\/p>\n

\tThe future of AI video may not be in creating photorealistic \u201cfake\u201d Hollywood movies with fake stars but movies that Hollywood can\u2019t make, or that it has heretofore never even dreamed of making.\u00a0The true frontier of the medium may be the point where the merger of \u201creal\u201d live-action performance and AI make films that were once uneconomic suddenly possible.<\/p>\n

\tThe real significance of the Brad Pitt vs. Tom Cruise video is that we are fast approaching the point where the cost of producing empty spectacle is zero. Visual imagery that once cost $250,000 per shot and thousands of man-hours to produce in CGI will be as plentiful as air, or water.\u00a0We will soon be swimming in it, and its cultural and economic value will decline accordingly.\u00a0But the supply of human drama, written by real writers and performed by real actors, will remain as scarce and valuable as ever.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tDavid Scarpa has been a leading voice in film and television for more than 20 years. Represented by Verve, he most recently wrote\u00a0<\/em>Gladiator II\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Napoleon, both for Ridley Scott.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s AI Issue.\u00a0<\/em>Click here to read more<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in February, Hollywood received a message from the future: \u201cI hate to say it, but it\u2019s likely over for us.\u201d This came from\u00a0Wolverine & Deadpool\u00a0screenwriter Rhett Reese in response to a clip posted on Twitter by the Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson.\u00a0The AI-generated video, as you\u2019ve almost certainly seen, depicted a fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise atop what appeared to be a Roman ruin set somewhat perplexingly against the New York City skyline. The clip seemed to represent a huge leap forward in AI-generated video, with high production values and realistic facial expression and movement.\u00a0It\u00a0looked\u00a0like a movie.\u00a0An expensive one.\u00a0While some commenters were critical, the quality of the video […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[319,440,441,2,27,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-ai-digital-issue","category-artificial-intelligence","category-hollywood","category-movie-news","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}