AI isn’t new to Hollywood – but this was the year it really made its presence felt. For years now, the entertainment industry has used a variety of generic AI products for a variety of post-production processes, from aging actors to removing green screen backgrounds. In many instances, technology has been a useful tool for human artists who have been tasked with difficult and laborious tasks that otherwise would have taken much longer to complete. But in 2025, Hollywood really started paying attention to the idea of deploying the kind of Gen AI that’s really only good for crafting text-to-video slop that doesn’t have much practical use in a traditional production workflow. Despite all the money and effort put into it, there has yet to be a Gen-AI project that has shown why it is worth all the hype.
This confluence of Hollywood and AI did not start off so well. Studios were in a prime position to take the companies behind this technology to court because their video generation models were explicitly trained on copyrighted intellectual property. Several major production companies, including Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery, filed lawsuits against AI firms and their boosters for this very reason. But some of Hollywood’s biggest power players decided to get into bed with AI proponents instead of dashing them. We’re just beginning to see what this new era of Gen-AI partnerships can bring, but all signs point to Things are going to get much worse in the near future.
Although many of this year’s Gen-AI headlines were dominated by large organizations like Google and OpenAI, we also saw a number of smaller players competing for a seat at the entertainment table. There was Asteria, Natasha Lyonne’s startup, which focused on developing film projects with “ethically” engineered video generation models, and also startups like Showrunner. Amazon supported platform Designed to let customers create animated “shows” (a very generous term) from a few descriptive sentences plugged into Discord. These relatively new companies were desperate to legitimize the idea that their flavor of General AI could be used to supercharge film/TV development while reducing overall production costs.
Asteria had nothing but hype to share with the public after announcing its first film, and it was hard to believe that normal people would be interested in paying for the showrunner’s poorly crafted show created by actual animators. In the latter case, it felt like the showrunner’s real goal was to secure juicy partnerships with established studios like Disney, allowing their technology to be incorporated into platforms where users could prompt custom content featuring recognizable characters from the franchise at large.
When the showrunner first arrived on the scene the idea seemed quite ridiculous as its models churned out the modern equivalent of lewd jibjab cartoons. But in due course, Disney made it clear that – with text-to-video generators being useless for anything beyond quick memes – it was interested in experimenting with that kind of content. In December, Disney signed a three-year, billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI that will let Sora users create AI videos with 200 different characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and others.
Netflix became one of the first major studios to proudly announce that it is working solely on Generation AI. After using the technology to create special effects for one of its original series, the streamer Published a list of general guidelines He wanted his partners to follow suit if they were also planning to jump on the slop bandwagon. Although Netflix wasn’t mandating that filmmakers use General AI, it made it clear that saving money on VFX work was one of the main reasons it came out in support of the trend. And it wasn’t long before Amazon followed suit by releasing several Japanese anime series Terribly Localized in Other Languages Because there were no human translators or voice actors involved in the dubbing process.
Amazon’s Gen-AI dubs became a vivid example of how poorly this technology can perform. He also highlighted how some studios are not putting enough effort into ensuring that their generation of AI-derived projects are prepared enough to be released to the public. this was also true Amazon’s Machine-Generated TV RecapIn which wrong information is often given about different shows. Both of these failures made it seem as if Amazon somehow thought people wouldn’t notice or care about AI’s inability to consistently generate high-quality output. The studio immediately removed its AI-dubbed series and recap feature, but didn’t say it wouldn’t try to do this kind of nonsense again.
All this and other silly stunts like that of AI “actress” Tilly Norwood made it feel like certain sections of the entertainment industry were becoming more comfortable with trying to impose Gen-AI “entertainment” on people, even if it left many people deeply unimpressed and disappointed. None of these projects demonstrated to the public why anyone except money-making executives (and those who worship them for some reason) would be excited about a future shaped by this technology.
Aside from a few unimpressive images, we still haven’t seen what might come from some of these collaborations, like Disney teaming up with OpenAI. But AI’s presence in Hollywood will be even more pronounced next year. Disney plans to dedicate 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 that it sends a message to other studios about how they should proceed as Hollywood enters its downhill era.
Even if Disney thinks it will work well, the studio has indicated that it does not want to be left behind if AI adoption continues to accelerate. This tells other production houses that they should follow suit, and if that happens, there’s no telling how much more stuff we’ll all be forced to endure.
