In February 2026, a 15-second video clip went viral online and shook an entire industry. There was a fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt on a burned-out overpass over a highway. It looked like real life. They looked like real people. Neither man had shown up for work.
ByteDance, the Chinese company that made TikTok, made the generative AI tool Seedance 2.0, which was used by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson to make the video. It wasn’t the idea itself that was really scary. It was the killing. This video of AI didn’t look creepy like the others that had awkward, glassy eyes. It looked like real movie footage. That’s when things got tricky.
Disney sent a “cease and desist” message almost right away. After that, SAG-AFTRA said it was “blatant infringement” of the actors’ voices and likenesses. The guild used strong language when they said that things like this “undermine the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood.” I find it hard to disagree. There is a lot of confusion about what studios really need from actors when an unknown director can get two A-list performances without making a single phone call.
All of this is based on a deeper worry that goes beyond any one viral moment. At the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, where one professor now runs his class almost nightly because the business moves too quickly to plan ahead, students are asking tough questions. Personal ones, not general ones. Are there jobs for them when they finish? Are the entry-level jobs they’re training for still open? The numbers don’t make me feel better. In the last three years, about 41,000 film and TV jobs have been lost in Los Angeles County alone. In 2024, the Animation Guild put out a report warning that by 2026, many creative jobs would be cut or combined. Some of those things that were said have already come true.
Not everything is moving, though. That’s the part that doesn’t fit into either the perfect or the terrible version of the story. Over two million tickets were sold for a new version of The Wizard of Oz (1939) at the Sphere in Las Vegas. AI was used to outpaint the film across a 160,000-square-foot LED dome, which made the film’s aspect ratio bigger. Ticket prices ranged from $100 to $200. It was paid for. There was no loss of experience because of the tech. It made one longer.
Edward Saatchi, an AI entrepreneur, is also trying to find lost footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons. He is doing this by feeding scripts, existing footage, actor notes, and new performances into an AI platform. The footage was thrown away by studio executives many years ago when they re-edited the movie without Welles’ permission. Saatchi’s plans seem well-thought-out. But his project brings up some really tough questions. For example, is it okay to change an artwork without the artist’s permission, even if you’re trying to restore the artist’s original vision?
It seems like Hollywood is being asked to answer a lot of big questions at once, without having time to think about any of them. There are filmmakers who want to do it right. Paul Trillo, who works at the AI studio Asteria, has been open about wanting to keep artists at the center of production by using AI to do boring tasks instead of creative ones. When working on a new music video, he made sure to keep track of how many real artists were involved. There were people there as well as the tools. McKinsey’s January 2026 industry report says the same thing. It predicts new types of jobs, like technicians who can combine live video with AI-generated environments and independent filmmakers who can make more money because production costs are going down.
Still, a studio executive quoted in the same report said AI could be a bigger change for the industry than anything else it has ever seen. That’s an interesting thing for someone who works in the system to say. Hollywood has been around through sound, VHS, and streaming. It’s likely to make it through this too. But the way from here to there isn’t as clear as everyone would likes to admit. And for people in film school who are hoping to build careers, that lack of certainty is very real.
