Industry Analysis

Cinema After the Prompt

The ground is shifting. Not in theory. In practice. AI is no longer an external force knocking at the gates. It is inside the system. Embedded across pre-production, post, marketing, and now development.

Studios are no longer asking if. They are deciding how. Disney explored deepfake applications on Moana and Tron: Ares but pulled back under legal and union pressure. The AI-generated opening for Secret Invasion aired and sparked immediate backlash from visual artists. Lionsgate, AMC, and Netflix are already in active use of Runway. The tools are deployed. Workflows are adjusting in real time.

The Wizard of Oz at Sphere installation showed what AI can look like at scale. Warner Bros, Sphere Entertainment, and DeepMind restored and expanded the original film for the 16K wraparound screen at Sphere. The performances were untouched. No synthetic doubles. No cloned voices. This was AI used as a restoration tool, not a replacement engine. It was tightly controlled. Carefully framed. It worked.

On the experimental side, Moonvalley’s latest raise brought its total funding to 154 million dollars. Its video model, Marey, is trained only on licensed content. The goal is to build a scalable toolset for filmmakers without crossing legal or ethical lines. No scraped data. No model collapse. It is aimed squarely at professional VFX and previsualization. Not full-blown synthetic cinema. At least not yet.

At the narrative level, Darren Aronofsky’s studio, Primordial Soup, premiered ANCESTRA at Tribeca. Directed by Eliza McNitt, the film merges live action with AI-generated sequences. The project kept all human jobs intact. But the visuals raised familiar questions. Where is the line between innovation and aesthetic drift? Between authorship and automation?

The conversation has moved. It is no longer about whether AI belongs in the process. It already is. The real question now is how the power is distributed. Who controls the tools? Who defines the pipeline? Who signs their name to the final cut?

This is not about replacement. It is about erosion. If authorship becomes a prompt, and point of view becomes optional, what happens to the work? What holds meaning?

The next few years will not be defined by better or worse films. They will be defined by which parts of the process we give away, and which we try to protect.

To be continued or generated....