TOM CRUISE VS. BRAD PITT WAS FAKE. HOLLYWOOD’S PANIC ISN’T:
Did you catch the video clip for the upcoming movie featuring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as the protagonists? There’s a full slobberknocker on a rooftop.
This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026
There’s only one problem: What you watched was fake.
Using AI tools to generate the fight, a Chinese tech company created the faces, voices, and movements that looked real enough to fool casual viewers.
The clip sparked immediate anxiety across Hollywood. If a machine stages a blockbuster fight between two A-listers without cameras or contracts, what else can it do?
Rhett Reese, one of the screenwriters behind the Deadpool franchise, warns that advances like these could “decimate” Hollywood.
It’s not an abstract idea; studios already use digital de-aging and CGI doubles. AI now eliminates more human labor from the process.
Jim Treacher responded to the imaginary Cruise and Pitt rumble by asking, “A.I. = Actors Inessential?”
It just feels like… It’s like you’re on the side of a mountain, and you’re looking up at an avalanche, and all you’ve got is a toy shovel.
I just don’t know how we stop this as a society. The incentives are too strong. If you can do something that amazing, that cheaply and quickly, people are going to do it.
There’s a good quote from a guy named Rhett Reese. He’s a screenwriter, Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote the Deadpool movies, he wrote Zombieland, a bunch of other stuff. He’s been very successful in Hollywood, so he’s looking at it from that perspective.
In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous.
I think that’s true. That’s kind of the bright side I’ve been trying to look at. The sort of democratization of this.
Some kid in… I dunno, Indiana? Is going to become a star by making movies that people want to see, using this technology.
In Hearts of Darkness, the brilliant documentary about the making of 1979’s Apocalypse Now, while he was in the Philippines directing one of the massive, sprawling and (at the time) expensive films ever made, Francis Ford Coppola mused:
To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some… just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That’s my opinion.
It took almost 50 years for technology to match Coppola’s vision, but for better or worse, that’s where we are today. As James Lileks asked in 2024: Art That’s Just for Me: What will the rise of artificial intelligence do to visual media?
In 10 years, there will be movies about every single person who boarded the Titanic. In the style of Robert Altman. In the style of Martin Scorsese. In the style of Steven Spielberg. There will be 100,000 fan-fic Star Wars movies as bad as the TV shows, all starring the person who dictated the scenario. There will be a subculture of people who exhaust the creative world of “Twin Peaks” with endless vignettes, and one or two will get it exactly right. In the end, we will watch our own movies more than others, and the theatrical experience will have gone from the great shared silver screen in the communal dark, to niche streaming, to watching our own particular curiosities and desires played on our own glowing rectangles. Millions of hours of movies, made for an audience of one.
I don’t know about that — I think the best AI video makers will garner their own followings, just as the most interesting YouTube channels acquire large numbers of viewers.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Me in 2005: Backyard Filmmakers Are Hollywood’s Greatest Fear. The entertainment industry’s real threat isn’t piracy, it’s backyard Spielbergs armed with digital movie gear.