The Death of Hollywood: When We Can All Create Movie Magic, It's Gone
- Mar 16
- 17 min read
Updated: Apr 20
I was eight years old when that Star Destroyer rumbled across the screen in the opening of Star Wars; after my mind had already been blown by the opening crawl rolling up the screen to the unforgettable score by John Williams. My jaw literally dropped, along with every other jaw in the packed theater. I had never experienced anything like it. Nobody had.
It was 1977, and for two hours I lived in a galaxy far, far away, because George Lucas showed me something I could not even imagine before that moment.
That feeling had a name, though I didn’t know it then: awe.
Awe is what happens when we encounter something that exceeds our current frame of reference. Our mental models have to stretch to accommodate it. When we become totally absorbed in the moment, we lose our sense of self. And that is an experience of transcendent freedom.
Psychologists have studied this. Awe makes us feel small in the best possible way, by connecting us with something vast. It reminds us that the world is more wondrous than we assumed, and we are part of that wonder. For those of us old enough to have been there, these movies delivered that experience in ways we carry to this day. We experienced movie magic.
A few years later, Superman took flight and we really did believe a man could fly. Then came classics like Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, and Terminator 2. In 1993, Steven Spielberg and the brilliant Steve “Spaz” Williams at Industrial Light & Magic gave us Jurassic Park and the most realistic dinosaurs we’d ever seen.
Williams’ groundbreaking CGI work changed the course of cinema forever. Director Peter Jackson has said it was seeing Jurassic Park that inspired him to begin planning The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Then came The Matrix in 1999, with “bullet time” camera work that made audiences gasp. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy created an entire world that felt lived-in and real. The Marvel movies made us marvel. These were the moments that defined movie magic for a generation.
Netflix has a wonderful series called The Movies That Made Us. I love it because it speaks to my experience and that of so many others. The movies made us because these shared cultural experiences connected us to the depths of ourselves and to the depths within others. Teens 30 years from now will not have “The Memes That Made Us” because who we are and what connects us cannot be found in the divided shallows.
What made every one of these moments magical was simple: we had never seen anything like them before, and we experienced the awe together.
But, sadly, that magic is now dead. And we accidentally killed it with progress. Young people today will never know what it was like to experience it. And that loss is bigger than most of us realize, because it’s not just happening to Hollywood.
The Bottlenecks That Made Magic
For most of cinema's history, there was a bottleneck between imagination and depiction. We could dream up fantastic things, but we couldn't show them. Monsters were actors in makeup or rubber suits. Alien worlds were painted backdrops.
That constraint was the secret ingredient of movie magic. Because scarcity is what makes something precious, not abundance. If everyone drove a Lamborghini, it would just be a car.
The first bottleneck was depiction itself. We simply could not put what we imagined on screen in any convincing way. Then CGI began to crack it open, but at first the results were crude. Early computer effects looked like computer effects. They were better fakes. And our imaginations were still beyond what the technology could deliver.
But the technology kept improving. By the time Spielberg showed us a living, breathing T. Rex in 1993, CGI had crossed a threshold that changed everything. We could now depict the impossible so convincingly that our eyes started having real trouble distinguishing the real from the artificial.
And that was not just another step forward. It was the beginning of the end. Once we can depict anything we can imagine with perfect photorealistic fidelity, there is nowhere left to go. A more detailed exploding planet does not look more real than one that already looks real. We reached a visual ceiling, and there is no going past it. Trying to push us beyond what we can take goes from unpleasant to unbearable.
The next bottleneck was cost. Only studios spending hundreds of millions of dollars could deliver photorealistic spectacle. That kept it rare, and rare still meant precious. Each time the cost barrier dropped, more studios could produce what only a few could before, and we saw more of what used to astonish us.
But our capacity for astonishment did not grow along with the supply. A sponge can only absorb so much water. Once it is saturated, pouring more on it just creates a mess. We started to become desensitized to movie magic.
The next bottleneck was access. We had to go to theaters to experience these moments, and that made them communal events and shared cultural milestones. Streaming dissolved that barrier. We could watch blockbuster spectacle from our couches. Then we reduced it to six inches on our iPhones. Our minds could not be blown when we could see everything, everywhere, all at once.
But one final bottleneck remained: someone with professional skill still had to actually make it.
That last bottleneck just fell with the release of AI video generation tools that we can use from our laptops.
And here is what we are left with. Every barrier between imagination and experience has been removed. We spent a century of progress clearing each one, and every step felt like a triumph. But what we could not see was that we were racing toward a set of limits that were never going to move.
Our brains have fixed ceilings for how much novelty, stimulation, and spectacle we can absorb. There are only so many waking hours in a day. Our eyes and brains can only process so much stimulation. Our capacity for awe saturates just like everything else.
No matter how much stimulating content is produced, we cannot experience more awe than our neurology allows.
The bottlenecks were never the obstacle. They were the protection. They kept us in the zone where each new breakthrough could still feel like a miracle. Now they are gone, and we have hit every ceiling at once. Supply is infinite. Our capacity to absorb it is not. The sponge is saturated.
We got everything we wished for. And that is exactly the problem.
When Anyone Can Create the Next Star Wars Movie
In February 2026, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generation tool so powerful that Hollywood is already in a panic. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter within 24 hours. Paramount followed suit, accusing ByteDance of “blatant infringement” of franchises including Star Trek, South Park, and Dora the Explorer. SAG-AFTRA condemned it. The Motion Picture Association called it “an attack on every creator around the world.”
Deadpool co-writer Rhett Reese watched a viral AI-generated clip of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on a rooftop and posted his response on social media: “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us. 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.”
He’s right. And this is just one tool from one company. My feed on X became flooded with AI-generated mashups: Predator versus Terminator, Homelander versus Superman, and Bruce Lee versus Godzilla.
The production quality on these clips is often indistinguishable from major studio releases. They were made on laptops, by individuals, in hours...perhaps minutes, in some cases.
The bottleneck isn’t narrowing anymore. It’s gone. Anyone can now create what only billion-dollar studios could produce a few years ago. Have you ever sat through those ten minutes of credits after a blockbuster movie like a Star Wars or a Marvel movie? All those names used to be required - now they are not.
And when everyone can do it, the magic vanishes. What used to require hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of skilled professionals now requires our text prompt and an internet connection.
The entire movie and television industry is now upended. Fellow Longhorn Matthew McConaughey sat down with Timothée Chalamet at a CNN and Variety town hall at UT Austin recently and told a room full of students about AI: “It’s coming. It’s already here. Don’t deny it.”
A recent article by Matt Shumer, “Something Big Is Happening,” went viral for a reason. It’s not just happening in Hollywood. Every sector of our civilization is being radically transformed at an exponential rate: medicine, science, coding, education, entertainment, law, politics… everything.
Here’s another way to think of what is happening. Something pairs with movies like nothing else: popcorn. A great movie paired with popcorn is an enhanced experience. They go together perfectly.
But what happens when we eat too much popcorn? We’ve all been there. Halfway through the bucket, we feel bloated, greasy, and a little sick. The thing that enhanced the experience in small doses ruined it in excess.
That’s not an argument against popcorn. It’s an argument against too much popcorn. That’s the problem with our screens. It’s not that we’re on them at all. It’s that we’re on them too much.
Overstuffed at the Infinite Buffet Table
If we haven’t eaten in five days, a banana would be divine. People would ask what our favorite meal was, and we’d always give the same answer: “I was starving for five days and finally ate a banana. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted.”
Now imagine life as a buffet table, but it grows from ten feet to a hundred feet to a thousand miles long and stocked with every cuisine imaginable. At a certain point, we can only eat so much. Consumption runs into biological limits.
We all know it doesn't feel good to over-indulge. An Infinite Buffet Table doesn’t make us any happier than one that’s a hundred feet long. And when we overstuff, we harm ourselves.
But that's not the only biological limit. Food can only taste so delicious. Our top ten favorite foods cluster tightly together because there’s no meal a hundred times better than what we already have available to us. Can you imagine eating a burger, pizza, or donut that is a hundred times better than any other version you’ve had?
In the modern world, we have access to an abundance and variety of ultra-processed, very tasty foods that are relatively inexpensive and easy to access. For most of us, we cannot consume any more delicious food than we already have access to without it becoming harmful. The implications are existential:
We have maxed out on maxing out.
We have more YouTube videos than we could watch in a thousand lifetimes. We have access to more songs, games, shows, and content than any human could consume. Adding more dishes to the buffet doesn’t help when we’re already bloated. Once we’re consuming the highest quality we can biologically tolerate, more will not make us any happier.
Having more can’t make us any happier when we’ve already had more than enough.
This is an inescapable reality rooted in our evolutionary heritage. Our brains have moment-to-moment ceilings for pleasure, stimulation, and satisfaction. We cannot exceed visual processing capacity, dopamine receptor saturation, or stimulation tolerance. Beyond these limits isn’t “more pleasure.” It’s saturation, overwhelm, and displeasure.
For millions of years throughout our evolutionary journey, the natural world kept us operating within these thresholds. Now we max out before lunch. And a brain that’s perpetually maxed out doesn’t feel pleasure anymore. We feel stressed, dazed, and numb, yet constantly enticed to pursue more by the attention economy.
We cannot pleasure ourselves into happiness.
In 1990, there was not one state in America with over a 15% obesity rate. By 2016, only 26 years later, there was not one state with UNDER a 20% obesity rate. The increased collective suffering from health-related problems cannot be calculated. Consider this - since the mind and body are connected:
What is happening to our waistlines is happening to our psyches.
I experienced this epiphany while watching U2 perform at The Sphere in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. Enveloped in a sea of sound and mind-blowing visual stimuli, I had a visceral realization: I cannot process anything more.
The Sphere is the peak of what can be tolerated and still be enjoyable. And yet the system keeps building bigger buffet tables.
Even the Stories Are Used Up
It’s not just the visuals. The archetypes are exhausted too. Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Neo, Spider-Man, and Katniss Everdeen. We’ve seen the hero of a thousand faces a million times now. How many "hero journeys" can we go on? Even the unlikely duos are now predictable.
It’s nearly impossible to create a new type of music that doesn’t sound like something we’ve already heard, or a completely original painting style. When all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, storytelling has hit the same wall.
It’s just the math. Simple chords can only be arranged in so many orders that resonate with us.
"I wish I found some chords in an order that is new/
I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang." - Twenty One Pilots, Stressed Out, 2015
Narrative archetypes can only be recombined so many ways. And with millions of people now generating content, all the combinations that would resonate easily have already been done. We create more tropes and cliches.
We cannot create new archetypes.
Now AI can generate more of what we’ve already seen. And we can’t consume any more of it even if we wanted to.
Marvel villains are already destroying the multiverse. How much bigger can the threat get? We can’t have a villain worse than one threatening the existence of all realities. Try thinking up a new superhero with a unique power that makes any kind of sense. Even "Impossible Man," who can do basically anything, is already a Marvel character.
How many more CGI fights do we need to see before we’re completely desensitized to all of them? There are only so many ways characters can fight each other and have it make any sense. We’ve already watched buildings blow up, cities crumble, worlds end, and entire universes collapse. We’ve hit the ceiling, and there is no going past it.
In October 2025, an AI-generated country act called Breaking Rust topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. That's right - the number one country song in America was written, performed, and produced entirely by artificial intelligence. There were no human singers or musicians on the song. The future isn’t coming. It’s here. And if we think this stops at country music, we’re not paying attention.
The Problem No Screenwriter Can Solve
There is another way AI has ruined movies and television that most people haven’t considered yet, but once they see it, they won’t be able to unsee it.
Think about every detective show, medical drama, and thriller that depends on characters struggling to solve a problem under pressure. The doctor in House races to diagnose a rare disease before the patient dies. A detective pieces together clues across weeks of investigation. A group of friends gets lost in the creepy woods with no way to call for help. A rom-com couple spends the entire movie caught in a misunderstanding that one honest conversation could resolve.
Now ask yourself: What would any of these characters do in 2026? They would pull out their phones.
The detective would search online databases and cross-reference suspects in seconds. The doctor would describe the symptoms to an AI and get a differential diagnosis before the opening credits finished. The lost hikers would check GPS. The romantic leads would text each other and clear up the confusion by the end of act one. Every horror movie already struggles to explain why the characters can’t call for help. Every mystery needs a reason they can’t just search for the answer.
Screenwriters have been wrestling with the “why don’t they just use their phones” problem for over a decade. What reason is it this time? We keep seeing them all - lost phones, no charge, or dead zones.
But these workarounds are becoming increasingly contrived. When your characters have access to a pocket supercomputer connected to the sum of all human knowledge and an AI that can reason through any problem they’re facing, every moment of dramatic tension requires an explanation for why they aren’t using it to solve the problem. The more contrived the explanation, the less believable the story.
Didn't we invent AI to easily and quickly answer any question? Solve all of our problems? Have AI "friends" to cure our loneliness? And now we are all carrying around the ultimate answer guru in our pockets?
A show like MacGyver, where the hero improvises solutions from everyday objects, can’t exist when the hero would just ask AI for the optimal solution. A show about bored, lonely, isolated characters getting into unexpected adventures doesn’t work when those characters would realistically be staring at screens.
That's the even deeper problem. What does a realistic movie in 2026 actually look like? Realistic family shows would depict characters in separate rooms of the house - getting lost in their own screens. They'd be watching Netflix, playing video games, or scrolling on TikTok. Perhaps they'd be sitting around talking to their chatbot friends.
Fiction Reframed
Ironically, we are watching those characters live the adventures we aren't having. And the insanity is, what makes these engaging stories "fiction" is not that they can't happen...or won't happen...it's because we wouldn't want them to. Would we
really want to trade places with Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Neo, Frodo Baggins, Katniss Everdeen, or the kids from Stranger Things?
Here's a reality check from a psychologist; any time our lives are in danger or those of our loved ones, or we are having to kill or be killed, that's called trauma. Any time our lives are being threatened, we'd gladly trade places with anyone sitting comfortably on a couch watching that happen to fictional people on Netflix.
We want to watch the movie, Titanic. We sure as hell wouldn't want to have been on it.
The only life that can fulfill us is the one we evolved to live, in real life. We can reflect on our own experiences to know the truth of this.
Take a moment and reflect to remember your happiest times in life. How many of those had to do with being on the screen? By yourself? How many had to do with family, friends, and loved ones; in-person? Engaged in real life? A sense of awe and connectedness with nature?
We cannot find deep-rooted happiness in that which we never evolved to experience.
The False Sense of Normalcy
What should alarm us is how normal all of this seems. We’ve adapted to the insanity so completely that we’ve mistaken the crazy for the norm. A kid with a laptop can now generate cinematic content that rivals anything in theaters, and most of us scroll past it on our phones without a second thought. We’re having profound voice conversations with AI chatbots. AI is diagnosing conditions better than some of our medical doctors. And somehow, we’re treating this like it’s no big deal.
But when we look at our current reality through ancient eyes, through the lens of the human beings we actually are and always have been, what we see is absolutely insane. Imagine explaining any of this to a hunter-gatherer. They wouldn’t just be confused. They’d think we’d lost our minds.
We have adapted our way into a false sense of normalcy. And that is exactly why we can’t see what’s happening.
Why We Can’t See What’s Happening
Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson diagnosed our predicament perfectly: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” We are cavemen piloting a spaceship being driven by ancient fears while wielding powers our ancestors would have called divine.
And physicist Albert Bartlett named our fatal flaw:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
This is what is called Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch. This entraps us within the progress paradox:
The progress we evolved to pursue has created an alien world we didn’t evolve to inhabit.
We suffer from what I’ve called evolutionary blindness. We didn’t evolve to perceive exponential change because nothing in our ancestral environment ever changed this fast. We need to look at our present through ancient eyes and our future through exponential eyes, but we evolved to do neither.
We can’t look backward at our origins to recognize what we’ve lost, and we can’t look forward at exponential acceleration to perceive what’s coming. We’re blind in both directions. We’ve forgotten that who we are is who we were.
Think back to the making of Jurassic Park. When Steve Williams’ CGI test was shown to stop-motion legend Phil Tippett, Tippett’s response was immediate: “I think I’m extinct.” Spielberg liked it so much he put the line in the movie.
In 1993, one artist’s breakthrough made one other artist feel obsolete. In 2026, AI is doing that to every single industry across the board, including the very one Spielberg’s genius helped build. This is what exponential change looks like.
And this is not just about Hollywood. The death of movie magic is a symptom of something much larger. AI is changing everything. Everything. The way we work, create, learn, practice law, educate our children, conduct politics, seek justice, and relate to each other - every facet of our lives is being transformed at a pace we didn’t evolve to comprehend. Our political, judicial, economic, and educational institutions are "medieval institutions" trying to manage a world that reinvents itself every few months.
Because AI will change everything, everything must change.
The Real Loss
What we’re really losing is not just movie magic. We’re losing the experience of awe itself. Awe requires encountering something beyond our current frame of reference, something that forces our mental models to expand. When I watched Star Wars in 1977, my eight-year-old mind was being stretched to accommodate something entirely new.
When audiences saw dinosaurs walk the earth in 1993, something shifted in how they understood what was possible. Those experiences connected us to wonder. We became more expansive through connecting with one another in shared awe.
That kind of experience is increasingly rare in a world where everything is instantly accessible and infinitely replicable. Young people today will never know what it was like during the "Great Before." They have been born into the infinite buffet. They’ve never known scarcity of spectacle, so they can’t feel the magic that scarcity once created.
My favorite line from my favorite movie keeps echoing in my mind. In Blade Runner, the replicant (synthetic human) Roy Batty uses his dying breath not to rage against humans, but to mourn the beauty he’d witnessed:
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
A machine, mourning lost wonder. If that doesn’t describe where we are, nothing does.
We have been so busy building an Infinite Buffet Table that we forgot we can only eat so much.
By making things better, we are making them worse.
We’ve been so focused on creating more that we forgot what made any of it matter in the first place.
The magic was never in the technology. It was in seeing something we had never seen before - and sharing that experience with others. And in a world where anyone can generate anything, that experience may be gone forever...unless...
What We Must Fight to Save
This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of our accelerating evolutionary mismatch: the very progress we celebrate is systematically destroying what makes life feel meaningful. This is not just in movies, but also in music, art, storytelling, work, and connection. When everything is abundant, nothing feels precious. When everyone can create everything, nothing creates awe.
The Hollywood we know and love is history. We can't stop that. But we can transform what comes next. Because what made those moments matter was never just about what was on the screen. It was that there were people sitting next to us.
When everyone saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, it connected us. That was something deeper than entertainment. Friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and a brilliant team brought us movie magic. But the true magic was what happened in the theater. Strangers became neighbors through a shared experience of awe.
As we fragment into millions of personalized content bubbles, each generating our own private spectacles, we lose the connective tissue that holds us together.
Steven Spielberg told an audience at SXSW 2026 in Austin: “I am not for AI that replaces a creative individual.” He’s right. We cannot allow our creative souls or our shared experiences to be destroyed by AI.
The magic was never in the technology. It was in seeing something we had never seen before, together - as neighbors. We can’t stop what’s coming. But we can fight to keep what matters most: the stories that connect us and the awe we feel side by side.
The question isn’t how we save Hollywood. It’s how we save each other.
Explore with AI
Copy and paste this prompt into any AI system and see what it tells you:
"Let us seek truth together through evidence and reason. Does having an infinite amount of stimulating content on our screens make us any happier? What does it mean for human flourishing to spend increasingly more time on our screens and less in the real world? What does the way screens affect our well-being reveal about who we actually are?"
References
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Brooks, M. (2026, February). Our evolutionary blindness to the AI revolution. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-happy-life/202602/our-evolutionary-blindness-to-the-ai-revolution
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Adult obesity prevalence maps. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data-and-statistics/index.html
Killkenny, K. (2026, February 13). AI video of Tom Cruise vs. Brad Pitt has top writer warning: "It's likely over for us." The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/ai-video-tom-cruise-brad-pitt-writer-warning-1236504200/
Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. Penguin Press.
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https://variety.com/2026/film/news/matthew-mcconaughey-timothee-chalamet-ai-actors-oscars-1236667017/
Rivkin, C. (2026, February 13). MPA statement on Seedance 2.0. In After AI video of 'Tom Cruise' fighting 'Brad Pitt' goes viral, Motion Picture Association denounces 'massive' infringement on Seedance 2.0. Variety. https://variety.com/2026/film/news/motion-picture-association-ai-seedance-bytedance-tom-cruise-1236661753/
Shumer, M. (2026, February 11). Something big is happening. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/02/11/something-big-is-happening-ai-february-2020-moment-matt-shumer/
Twenty One Pilots. (2015). Stressed out [Song]. On Blurryface. Fueled by Ramen.
Wikipedia contributors. (2025).
Breaking Rust. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Rust
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