“We’re screwed.”
Actress Emily Blunt after seeing the AI-created Tilly
Variety, September 29, 2025
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less”
Retired U.S. Army General Eric Shinseki
I wasn’t there in the late 1800s when the first moving images were projected.
I wasn’t there in the early 1900s when people watched short movies in Nickelodeons.
I wasn’t there in the late 1920s when sync sound motions pictures began replacing silent movies.
I wasn’t there in the 1950s when television changed American viewing habits.
But I was in Los Angeles in the 1980s to witness a world of change in the world of film and television. That’s when cable TV, VHS/Beta tapes/LaserDiscs became common place.
All of the above were disrupters that eventually helped movies and tv shows flourish. New exposure and new income streams. In the mid-80s I also went to an industry showcase that featured some of the first clips of computer generated images (CGI). The only thing I remember about that showcase was an actor in the audience stood up and yelled, “Pretty soon you won’t need us!”
About a decade later Forrest Gump won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Special Effects, and Best Actor (Tom Hanks). I remember Hanks saying of the CGI heavy film something like, ”You won’t believe anything you see after this movie.” (Spoiler alert: he really wasn’t a world master ping pong player. That was CGI.)
Let’s skip over the disrupters COIVD and streaming that brought peak TV and fast forward 30 years from the 1995 Oscar Awards and look at the current major disruption—Artificial Intelligence (AI). I saw my first version of this about seven years ago and it looked like a bad high school video project.
But the video (below) I saw over the weekend that was said to be 100% AI is much closer to a Hollywood production than anything AI related that I saw pre-COIVD. Variety reported that actress Emily Blunt said upon seeing the AI created character Tilly, ”We’re all screwed.”
The Hollywood backlash was instant. But that won’t stop it. The first films 125 years ago didn’t seem like they’d become a viable business—but they did. There were those in the 1920s that said the talkies would never replace silent movies— but they did. In the 1950s there were those that said TV would never replace radios because people wouldn’t take the time to sit still in their homes and watch TV—but they did. BIG TIME.
So here we are at an inflection point. In just the last five years Hollywood has endured COVID, a decline in box office attendance, a Writer’s strike, the destruction of the 2025 wildfires, the rise of TikTok attention spans, and incentives that have seen productions run away to Las Vegas, New Mexico, Atlanta, Rome, Vancouver, Bulgaria and probably a few places you didn’t even think were countries.
AI has already made inroads to replace scenic painters that have been a staple in movies for 100 years. I do think it will have a major disruption in how movies will be made. (Just as it’s predicated to have in just about ever industry in the coming years.)
But people will always want stories. Those don’t have to be $200 million feature films that cost a family almost $100 to see in theaters. Something has to change and it looks like AI is going to help usher that it. And for those of you that watch the video below and don’t see the potential—consider this is the equivalent of the internet in 1995. Back when most people were still on dialup.
Hollywood can circle the wagons and say they’re not going to embrace this, but to paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola 50 years ago about video cameras— some kid today in Ohio, or Iowa, or Bulgaria, or South Korea, or some place you didn’t know was a country is working on his or her AI filmmaking skills and is going to be ”the new Mozart and make a beautiful film.”
P.S. Actors have been around a long time—at least a couple thousand years before film was even invented. And while a tough way to make a living, they’ll be around for quite a while. Director George Miller said recently that there was fear from painters when photography was invented, but photography didn’t replace painting or painters—it just became a new art form. A new way for creative people to express themselves. My guess is that will be true of AI.
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles and runs the Filmmaking With Brass Knuckles YouTube channel.
Screenwriting from Iowa 