Ask anyone in Hollywood whether they use AI and you’ll get a shrug, a denial, or a very quiet yes. According to Matthew Belloni, a founding partner at Puck who has covered the industry for decades, the honest answer is simpler: everyone is doing it. The only real question now is who controls what comes next.
Belloni draws a useful line between two flavors of the technology. There’s corporate AI — the unglamorous stuff that streamlines processes and improves search — which is already everywhere and uncontroversial. Then there’s generative AI, the part that actually makes content, and that’s where things get murky.
On the creative side, adoption is quietly widespread. Belloni describes a prominent showrunner who reportedly scolded her writers’ room for not using ChatGPT to brainstorm jokes and scene ideas. Screenwriters, he says, lean on it to sketch scenarios or describe a location — the kind of grunt work that used to be done with a Google search. Notably, the Writers Guild is fine with this, provided every script keeps a credited human writer and the practice doesn’t cost jobs.
The bigger disruption is landing first in animation, where scenes and storyboards can be roughed out without artists. Even Netflix said on its most recent earnings call that 300 shows use generative AI. Belloni’s verdict on AI-generated movies, shorts, and pilots so far? “They’re not great” — and you can usually tell, which is precisely the problem when the goal is to connect with an audience.
The stigma remains real. Belloni points to Amazon’s generative studio, which held a media day and still carries that stigma. Yet the money is moving in anyway:
- Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI company for US$587 million.
Why the rush? Fear of being left behind, plus a brutal economic squeeze: production costs keep climbing while box office doesn’t reliably follow. A Pixar original, Belloni notes, is hard to make cheaply with its labor-intensive California process. With unions unwilling to cut labor costs, studios are eyeing non-unionized below-the-line work and technology.
The counterexample is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a sprawling, star-packed, globe-spanning production. It stands apart as the kind of film made with real people and real stakes, in contrast to content that audiences simply, passively consume.
