Artificial intelligence is not up-to-date in Hollywood, but this was the year when its presence was truly felt. For years, the entertainment industry has been using various types of generative AI products in various post-production processes, ranging from de-aging actors to removing green screen backgrounds. In many cases, this technology has proven to be a useful tool for artists who were tasked with tedious and painstaking work that would otherwise take them an inordinate amount of time to complete. However, in 2025, Hollywood has really started to like the idea of implementing artificial intelligence gen., which is really only good for creating text on video, which does not have many practical applications in established production processes. Despite all the money and effort put into it, there has yet to be a gen-AI project that shows why it’s worth all the hype.
This combination of Hollywood and artificial intelligence didn’t start out so rosy. The studios were in a prime position to sue the companies behind the technology because their video generation models were explicitly trained in copyrighted intellectual property. Many major production companies, including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery, has filed lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies and their enablers for this very reason. But rather than run AI vendors into the ground, some of Hollywood’s biggest influencers have decided to go to bed with them. We’ve only just begun to see what can come from this up-to-date era of gen-AI partnerships, but all signs point to this Things are going to get a lot messier in the near future.
While many of this year’s AI headlines were dominated by larger companies like Google and OpenAI, we also saw some smaller players competing for a seat at the entertainment table. There was Asteria, Natasha Lyonne’s startup focused on developing film projects with “ethically” developed video generation models, and startups such as Showrunner, Platform powered by Amazon designed to allow subscribers to create animated “shows” (a very broad term) from just a few descriptive sentences connected to Discord. All of these relatively up-to-date companies were desperately trying to legitimize the idea that their flavor of Gen AI could be used to accelerate film/TV development while lowering overall production costs.
Asteria had nothing more than hype to convey to the public after announcing its first film, and it was tough to believe that normal people would be interested in paying for Showrunner-shoddiously cobbled together knockoffs of shows created by real animators. In the latter case, one could get the impression that the Showrunner’s real goal was to ensure fruitful cooperation with established studios such as Disney, which would lead to the transfer of their technology to platforms where users could display personalized content featuring recognizable characters from huge brands.
This idea seemed quite absurd when Showrunner first appeared on the scene, as his models create the current equivalent of clunky JibJab cartoons. However, in due course, Disney made it clear that – while text-to-video generators are impoverished for anything other than quick memes – it was interested in experimenting with this type of content. In December, Disney entered into a three-year, billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI that will allow Sora users to create AI movies featuring 200 different characters from Star Wars, Marvel and more.
All of this, and other stupid stunts like AI “actress” Tilly Norwood, made it seem like certain segments of the entertainment industry were becoming more and more comfortable trying to force Gen. AI “entertainment” on people, even though it left many people unimpressed and discouraged. None of these projects showed the public why anyone other than money-hungry executives (and people who, for some reason, adore them) would be excited about a future shaped by this technology.
Outside of a few unimpressive images, we still don’t know what might come from some of these collaborations, like Disney getting closer to OpenAI. But next year, AI’s presence in Hollywood will be even more noticeable. Disney plans to dedicate an entire section of its streaming service to user-generated content from Sora and will encourage Disney employees to utilize OpenAI’s ChatGPT products. But the real significance of this deal at this point in time is the message it sends to other studios about how they should behave as Hollywood enters the slippery era.
Whether or not Disney thinks it will work, the studio has signaled that it doesn’t want to be left behind if AI adoption continues to gain momentum. This tells other labels that they should follow suit, and if they do, there’s no telling how much longer we’ll have to put up with this stuff.