Is AI the future of film making?

[Joerg Polzfusz]

https://deadline.com/2026/05/open-ai-produced-animated-family-film-critterz-cannes-1236879586/

[Joerg Polzfusz]

https://variety.com/2026/film/festivals/demi-moore-ai-hollywood-cannes-must-work-with-it-1236745587/

[Karim D. Ghantous]

FWIW:

(54:25)

[Jon O'Brien]

On 5/25/2026 at 3:03 AM, Aristeidis Tyropolis said:

The image generation "capabilities" might improve, but I'd say the content will get worse.

Likely so, from what I've seen so far.

In other news, Australia is to get a new pro film lab, Chroma in Melbourne. Opening for business next month I think. Pro film industry processing for features, dailies, etc. The proprietor brought over from NZ massive pieces of equipment, tons of it, literally.

Things are looking up for film in Australia. At last.

I think AI films will be a thing. But only for the percentage of cinema goers who are into that kind of stuff. Just like some people love playing digital sax. Sure, it that's what you're into, go for it.

 

 

[Pavan Deep]

I'm probably reapeating what has already been said here. I wonder how much AI-generated content is just a novelty, AI content may enjoy a brief surge in popularity, but like most trends, I wonder if the appeal is likely to fade over time. The real debate for me is whether AI is filmmaking at all. At the end of the day, you’re mostly sitting alone at a computer typing prompts into a machine. There’s a scene in the 1980s US TV series Fame where a character says he doesn’t need an orchestra, and his teacher replies: “That’s not music. That’s self-gratification.”, an interesting point.

I think a film only becomes alive because of people who all bring different ideas, personalities and instincts into it. You argue, brainstorm, disagree, improvise. Actors bring something impossible to fully predict, they interpret characters in their own way, add emotion, timing, body language, vulnerability and all the little human details that make performances feel real and spontaneous. I believe that this human clash of creativity is what makes filmmaking exciting and when you take that away it just becomes empty content, which might be technically impressive, but might lack depth, spontaneity and soul that make films memorable.

Having said that, I’m not some anti-technology ‘Luddite’ , I can absolutely see areas where AI could genuinely help the creative process instead of replacing it. For example, AI can speed up some of huge amount of repetitive and routine work behind the scenes. I can understand storyboard artists using it as an aid to quickly visualise sequences, or production designers generating rough concepts to communicate ideas before building sets or refining designs properly. Used that way, it becomes more like a creative assistant or sketchbook rather than the actual artist.

Cinema has always evolved with new tools, AI can maybe help with preparation or visualisation, but I don’t think it can replicate the unpredictability and humanity that comes from real people creating something together.

Pav

 

Edited May 26 by Pavan Deep

[Uli Meyer]

This guy is having a huge fan following and I can see how it appeals to some. It's definitely not just a fad. I don't think you could make a convincing 'Remains Of The Day' because I doubt that you could prompt chemistry between actors, amongst other things that need the human touch. But for SciFi comic book projects like these? 

 

Edited May 26 by Uli Meyer

[Aristeidis Tyropolis]

2 hours ago, Uli Meyer said:

This guy is having a huge fan following and I can see how it appeals to some. It's definitely not just a fad. I don't think you could make a convincing 'Remains Of The Day' because I doubt that you could prompt chemistry between actors, amongst other things that need the human touch. But for SciFi comic book projects like these? 

 

Interesting to watch the absolute immense torrent of AI written kudos comments below.

I don't believe anyone reasonable believes it's going to go away, but similarly I don't think anyone sensitive to the arts watches this as some kind of artistic revelation.

The audience that consumes superhero movies with explosions and oversaturated steampunk fiction is a targetable financial target group, it wasn't that these movies were particularly deep to begin with or weren't already a repeat of each other - that industry is now extremely risk averse anyway so the scripts were already too formulaic, as such alot of emphasis will be placed on those, the industry will find a way to feed it self at the lowest possible cost - it's mostly sad for all this production talent that will most likely need to find other sources of revenue.

On the other side of that there will be audiences that are going to (and already are) resist(ing) this.

 

 

Edited May 26 by Aristeidis Tyropolis

[Max Field]

On 5/26/2026 at 1:01 PM, Uli Meyer said:

This guy is having a huge fan following and I can see how it appeals to some. It's definitely not just a fad. I don't think you could make a convincing 'Remains Of The Day' because I doubt that you could prompt chemistry between actors, amongst other things that need the human touch. But for SciFi comic book projects like these? 

 

Ehhh this gives really bad uncanny valley

[Kris Kaspian]

AI film-making is only viable because most human-made film-making entered a deep trench of mediocrity. The bar is now set so low that a machine can match it.

However: To make the equivalent of, for example, Apocalypse Now (1979), the AI system would have to be immeasurably complex. Such a machine is at least a hundred-years and many trillions-of-dollars beyond anything we have now. 

Why? Because great movies do not follow the mechanical process of script -> storyboard -> visual output. Although that is part of it. Apocalypse Now resulted from a collision of forces, many of them subconscious and ineffable. Not least the collision between the actors on set; heart-attacks; "madness" etc. These inputs and interactions cannot be computer-simulated.

To make Apocalypse Now the AI system would have to use its rudimentary models to emulate:

1. The director and his subconscious mind.
2. The cast and crew and their subconscious minds and life experiences.
3. The chaos and magic of shooting in the wild.
4. The collision between all these factors and more.

The AI would then have to input a script into this simulation. On top of this near-impossible feat, the computer would need to perfectly emulate human-movement (which it still struggles with) and emulate 35mm anamorphics etc.

Since AI can currently do almost none of these things (and certainly not 1 through 4) it is not going to replace excellent cinema. However, the AI systems can replace most present-day cinema just fine.

But: before AI could get close to human-quality filmmaking, today, the film industry had to be largely reduced to mush. 

It's at least 100 years until a computer will make a great movie. If ever.

Even if AI could emulate items 1-4 above (and perhaps in a hundred years there's a tiny sliver of a chance it could) these film-making simulations would require data-centers at least 10,000x the power of anything we have today.

Imagine how much computing power would be required to contain Stanley Kubrick's life; his subconcious mind, and his connections to the collective subconscious (the latter, in itself, another 50 square miles of data-centers, I'd estimate).

And the cost! Stanley Kubrick cost around $100 a day in food to keep running. What would a Stanley Kubrick in computer form cost to run each day? The requisite 75 square-mile data-center emulation of Kubrick's mind would be an environmental catastrophe. Why even try?

TL;DR: For generations to come, AI will not replace great film-making.

The reason AI is being pitched as a replacement for you, as film-makers, is to demoralize the artists in this industry further so that the quality of film-making drops even more and the prophesy of the AI-filmmaking gods is, therefore, rendered true.

AI will win ONLY if you give up. And it will win not because the AI systems made films that matched high-quality-human-made work, but because human-made films got so bad that the AI didn't even have to try.

Ignore the doomsayers, AI-made movies will not beat the best of the work you are capable of, at least for hundreds of years. This talk of AI-movies will all look ridiculous in five years from now. It's pure hype to drive stock-prices and its foundational premise does not withstand the slightest analytical-scrutiny from anyone with deep systems-knowledge (ie. anyone who is not staring into a 'smart'-phone all day).

Edited June 12 by Kris Kaspian

[Jon O'Brien]

1 hour ago, Kris Kaspian said:

The bar is now set so low that a machine can match it.

excuse my French, but how the flippin heck did we get into this dumb situation in the first place?

Or, to put it in the King's English, what the **** happened to the film industry?

[Jon O'Brien]

I saw "Michael" in the cinema the other day. Yeah .... it was okay. To be fair, it was not bad. Great? I can't remember the last time I saw 'Great' in the cinema. Maybe it was the time I went to Hoyts to see My Fair Lady projected on a film print.

[Kris Kaspian]

23 minutes ago, Jon O'Brien said:

...what the **** happened to the film industry?

The ultimate question! 

Here's my top five reason for the decline:

1. The digital-camera industry failed to match the quality of the 35mm analog-film medium it claimed to be replacing. As cinema was, for over one-hundred-years, defined by the look and feel of this precise medium, audiences were turned-off and many artists recoiled from making movies. In response, the digital camera companies used apologists across the industry to convince us that our eyes were wrong and they were right. More artists left the industry. The mystical foundation of the medium was nuked.

Still today, you'll find those who claim digital looks like film. What they mean is: It looks like mediocre film if you've mostly-forgotten how analog film can look; but who wants to watch that?

They also tore out all most of the analog-projector equipment; so you can't make a comparison. Just trust them.

2. Shooting film was expensive: Even if a movie was trash, you at least knew the makers of the movie were punished for their transgressions by the cost of making the thing.

3. Studios cared more about the quality of storytelling because a movie used to have to be good to succeed. Now a movie is very-often just the final-disappointment in a complex scam that began with a targeted ad-campaign on Facebook.  The movie often, now, only exists to fulfill the obligation to provide something to those who are being scammed. Like finding a brick in a box where you expected the computer you were sold by a man-on-the-street to be. There has to be something at the end of the con; or the con won't work. Many modern movies are a "brick in a box".

4. Good film-making threatens entrenched power-systems and challenges society; so it was attacked: I imagine most of you have noticed that, at least since the 1990s, we've witnessed the wilful destruction of culture by those who culture challenges: Legacy power-systems. Film-making didn't just get bad because it felt like it... It was PUSHED.

5. Kompromat: No point going deep into this here, but let's just say that flying to a certain island didn't put many actors and directors in a good position to make any art that challenged those who pull their strings. Remember this had been going on for decades before it was revealed to us.

Interested to hear the top-five of others here!

Edited June 12 by Kris Kaspian