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Hollywood cozied up to AI in 2025 and had nothing good to show for it

By Charles Pulliam-Moore

Thursday, December 25, 2025

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Hollywood cozied up to AI in 2025 and had nothing good to show for it

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AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report Hollywood cozied up to AI in 2025 and had nothing good to show for it The technology dominated the entertainment discourse, but there’s yet to be a series or movie that shows AI’s potential. The technology dominated the entertainment discourse, but there’s yet to be a series or movie that shows AI’s potential. by Charles Pulliam-Moore Close Charles Pulliam-Moore Film & TV Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Charles Pulliam-Moore Dec 25, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC Link Share Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Part Of The Verge’s 2025 in review see all Charles Pulliam-Moore Close Charles Pulliam-Moore Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years. AI isn’t new to Hollywood — but this was the year when it really made its presence felt. For years now, the entertainment industry has used different kinds of generative AI products for a variety of post-production processes ranging from de-aging actors to removing green screen backgrounds. In many instances, the technology has been a useful tool for human artists tasked with tedious and painstaking labor that might have otherwise taken them inordinate amounts of time to complete. But in 2025, Hollywood really began warming to the idea of deploying the kind of gen AI that’s really only good for conjuring up text-to-video slop that doesn’t have all that many practical uses in traditional production workflows. Despite all of the money and effort being put into it, there’s yet to be a gen-AI project that has shown why it’s worth all of the hype. This confluence of Hollywood and AI didn’t start out so rosy. Studios were in a prime position to take the companies behind this technology to court because their video generation models had clearly been trained on copyrighted intellectual property. A number of major production companies including Disney, Universal , and Warner Bros. Discovery did file lawsuits against AI firms and their boosters for that very reason. But rather than pummeling AI purveyors into the ground, some of Hollywood’s biggest power players chose instead to get into bed with them. We have only just begun to see what can come from this new era of gen-AI partnerships, but all signs point to things getting much sloppier in the very near future. Though many of this year’s gen-AI headlines were dominated by larger outfits like Google and OpenAI , we also saw a number of smaller players vying for a seat at the entertainment table. There was Asteria , Natasha Lyonne’s startup focused on developing film projects with “ethically” engineered video generation models, and startups like Showrunner , an Amazon-backed platform designed to let subscribers create animated “shows” (a very generous term) from just a few descriptive sentences plugged into Discord. These relatively new companies were all desperate to legitimize the idea that their flavor of gen AI could be used to supercharge film / TV development while bringing down overall production costs. Asteria didn’t have anything more than hype to share with the public after announcing its first film, and it was hard to believe that normal people would be interested in paying for Showrunner’s shoddily cobbled-together knockoffs of shows made by actual animators. In the latter case, it felt very much like Showrunner’s real goal was to secure juicy partnerships with established studios like Disney that would lead to their tech being baked into platforms where users could prompt up bespoke content featuring recognizable characters from massive franchises. That idea seemed fairly ridiculous when Showrunner first hit the scene because its models churn out the modern equivalent of clunky JibJab cartoons. But in due time, Disney made it clear that — crappy as text-to-video generators tend to be for anything beyond quick memes — it was interested in experimenting with that kind of content. In December, Disney entered into a three-year, billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI that would let Sora users make AI videos with 200 different characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and more. Netflix became one of the first big studios to proudly announce that it was going all-in on gen AI. After using the technology to produce special effects for one of its original series , the streamer published a list of general guidelines it wanted its partners to follow if they planned to jump on the slop bandwagon as well. Though Netflix wasn’t mandating that filmmakers use gen AI, it made clear that saving money on VFX work was one of the main reasons it was coming out in support of the trend. And it wasn’t long before Amazon followed suit by releasing multiple Japanese anime series that were terribly localized into other languages because the dubbing process didn’t involve any human translators or voice actors. Amazon’s gen-AI dubs became a shining example of how poorly this technology can perform. They also highlighted how some studios aren’t putting all that much effort into making sure that their gen AI-derived projects are polished enough to be released to the public. That was also true of Amazon’s machine-generated TV recaps , which frequently got details about different shows very wrong. Both of these fiascos made it seem as if Amazon somehow thought that people wouldn’t notice or care about AI’s inability to consistently generate high-quality outputs. The studio quickly pulled its AI-dubbed series and the recap feature down, but it didn’t say that it wouldn’t try this kind of nonsense again. Disney-provided examples of its characters in Sora AI content. Image: Disney All of this and other dumb stunts like AI “actress” Tilly Norwood made it feel like certain segments of the entertainment industry were becoming more comfortable trying to foist gen-AI “entertainment” on people even though it left many people deeply unimpressed and put off. None of these projects demonstrated to the public why anyone except for money-pinching execs (and people who worship them for some reason) would be excited by a future shaped by this technology. Aside from a few unimpressive images, we still haven’t seen what all might come from some of these collaborations, like Disney cozying up to OpenAI. But next year AI’s presence in Hollywood will be even more pronounced. Disney plans to dedicate an entire section of its streaming service to user-generated content sourced from Sora, and it will encourage Disney employees to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT products. But the deal’s real significance in this current moment is the message it sends to other studios about how they should move as Hollywood enters its slop era. Regardless of whether Disney thinks this will work out well, the studio has signaled that it doesn’t want to be left behind if AI adoption keeps accelerating. That tells other production houses that they should follow suit, and if that becomes the case, there’s no telling how much more of this stuff we are all going to be forced to endure. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Charles Pulliam-Moore Close Charles Pulliam-Moore Film & TV Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Charles Pulliam-Moore AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Analysis Close Analysis Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Analysis Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Film Close Film Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Film Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report TV Shows Close TV Shows Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All TV Shows More In The Verge’s 2025 in review See all Free speech’s great leap backwards Felipe De La Hoz 1:00 PM UTC The best shows to watch on HBO Max from 2025 Charles Pulliam-Moore Dec 29 Windows on Arm had another good year Antonio G. Di Benedetto Dec 29 Most Popular Most Popular GOG’s Steam-alternative PC game store is leaving CD Projekt, staying DRM-free Turn your PC into a Super Nintendo with Epilogue’s new USB dock LG is announcing its own Frame-style TV at CES The Canon EOS R6 Mark III is great, but this lens is amazing This experimental camera can focus on everything at once The Verge Daily A free daily digest of the news that matters most. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Advertiser Content From This is the title for the native ad

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