Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt can relax. AI won’t kill movies.

A highly realistic AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a bare-knuckle fight, courtesy of Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0, has fanned the flames of worry among Hollywood creatives. Photo / Created by AI

Justin Hackney is used to being ostracised. The movie producer, who played “the infected kid” in director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, shadowed Boyle for years and then pivoted into tech halfway through his career, taking roles with OpenAI and ElevenLabs to evangelise the benefits of generative artificial intelligence tools in filmmaking and advertising. Friends from the industry stopped talking to him; one ad agency executive had his head in his hands as he listened to one of Hackney’s presentations.

“A lot of people hated me, and I don’t blame them to be honest,” Hackney tells me.

The film and television industries have vigorously resisted AI out of concern it will replace scriptwriters, storyboard artists, visual effects experts and more. Highly realistic AI videos like the one of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a bare-knuckle fight, courtesy of Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0, have fanned the flames of worry.

On Sunday, Conan O’Brien kicked off his monologue for the 2026 Oscars by saying he was “honoured to be the last human host of the Academy Awards.”

AI film revolution: How Justin Hackney’s Wonder is reshaping production. Photo / Getty Images

Much of the fear is warranted. Concept artists are struggling when studios can cheaply gin up storyboards in minutes. Los Angeles County has lost 41,000 film and TV jobs in three years, about a quarter of its entertainment workforce, and DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has said AI will replace most animators.

“In the good old days, you might need 500 artists and years to make a world-class animated movie,” he told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in 2023. “I don’t think it will take 10% of that three years from now.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean AI will destroy the art of filmmaking; instead, it may provide opportunities for people who otherwise might not have the means to make movies with seemingly high production values, in much the same way that Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube has built a marketplace for creators to make money from content produced on shoestring budgets.

Despite the cold shoulder from his peers, Hackney has delved deeper into the world of synthetic filmmaking. Last year he co-founded Wonder, a London-based production company that funds short films, music videos and TV ads generated with AI. Its financial backers include executives from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, alongside Hollywood veterans like the former CEO of StudioCanal.

Wonder’s commercial breakthrough came last September with the launch of British singer Lewis Capaldi’s music video for Something in the Heavens, which was entirely AI-generated; it’s also produced a smattering of animated short films and video advertisements.

What YouTube did for distribution, AI is doing for production. While high-end TV and film production might cost around US$500,000 to $1 million (NZ$855,000 to NZ$1.7m) per minute of finished content, Wonder claims AI can bring that down to between $10,000 and $20,000 per minute.

Highly realistic AI videos like the one of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a bare-knuckle fight, courtesy of Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0, have fanned the flames of worry among Hollywood creatives. Photo / Created by AI

The firm also commissions work, taking a 50/50 split on intellectual property after investing a lump sum such as $25,000 in a filmmaker. Netflix Inc. and other studios typical pay creators on a “cost plus” basis, in which the studio owns all or nearly all of the rights to a creative work. (Star Wars creator George Lucas was a rare exception as a filmmaker who negotiated ownership - becoming a billionaire as a result.)

Wonder, which is based in a converted east London church, recently did a deal with Swedish author of a children’s book called Maxi and Helium, which had sold 5 million copies. The company turned it into an animated children’s show for YouTube, dubbed into five languages and all via AI. Rather than selling the rights to Walt Disney Co. or Netflix Inc., author Camilla Brinck co-owns the IP with Wonder.

Wonder lets creators keep 50% of IP, instead of studios owning it all. Photo / Getty Images

Models like these could be critical in helping ensure that the flood of new AI films and animations don’t bombard us with slop. Filmmakers become more like stakeholders, incentivising them to care more about quality in a way that someone producing AI content for a flat fee might not.

While AI will almost certainly hurt background actors and VFX workers, there are some grounds for cautious optimism. The rise of YouTube led to a new economy, adding US$55 billion to US gross domestic product and supporting the equivalent of 490,000 full-time jobs, according to a 2024 Oxford Economics study commissioned by YouTube.

Disruption hurts, but thoughtful gatekeepers can help it create more jobs than it destroys. Hackney’s days as an industry pariah are clearly over.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.

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