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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

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## Image Description
The image shows a cartoon robot with a yellow body, blue eyes, and the letters "AI" on its chest. It has a friendly expression and is waving its hands. The robot is standing on two legs and has a playful, whimsical design. The background is a gradient of light blue to white.

# Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al
Precedent, Increasing Creative Control, and Hollywood's Woes

DOUG SHAPIRO
MAR 25, 2025

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Source: Midjourney.

GenAI obviously has the potential to be extremely disruptive to media businesses in
general and Hollywood in particular, but the speed and extent of this disruption hinge
on a few critical unknowns. These include how far the technology will evolve and to
what degree consumers will accept AI-enabled content, both of which I discussed in
my last post (How Far Will AI Video Go?). Another is how and when the murky legal
questions around GenAI will be resolved.

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

In this post I address another key unknown: whether talent will embrace it. That's
critical. Amid all the cool Al video demos, shorts, experiments, and fake movie trailers,
it has remained very clear that Al video will only affect culture and the media business
if people use it to produce compelling stories. Otherwise it's just a parlor trick. But
which people?

Talented people outside of Hollywood will unquestionably embrace it. There are
probably tens or hundreds of thousands of “lost Einsteins” globally: creative and
driven people who have an urge to create but either failed to make it in Hollywood or,
more likely, never tried. I also think that there are thousands of people working in
below-the-line jobs and around the periphery of Hollywood ¹—development,
production management, talent representation, marketing, etc.-who got into the
entertainment business to tell stories, but for whatever reason found themselves in
adjacent roles. (Interestingly, so far, many of the creatives at the forefront of AI have
come from creative agencies-storytellers who do brand work but have long itched to
tell stories of their own.)

But what about established talent within Hollywood? Attracting talented, successful
storytellers would accelerate the disruption and enable GenAI to reach its full
potential. People often talk about “Hollywood” as some monolithic thing, but of
course it's not. The studios and talent have long been in an uneasy codependent
relationship, a combination of aligned and misaligned interests. Each desperately
needs the other, but they share a mutual distrust and often clash over creative control,
credit, and, of course, money. That tension boiled over during the strikes in 2023 and a
lot of ill will remains.

In Hollywood, there has been a lot of vocal antipathy toward AI. But the ice is starting
to thaw. Over the next year, I believe that many more Hollywood creatives will
embrace it-including household name directors, writers, and producers-for three
reasons: precedent, the continued progression of creative control in AI, and, most
important, the problems in Hollywood will push them that way.

Tl;dr:

*   Many in Hollywood have spoken out against AI, but some high-profile writers,
    directors, and producers are publicly endorsing it, with many more privately
    experimenting. Over the next year, I expect many more to emerge.
*   There is a long history of creatives first rejecting new technologies as somehow
    undermining or bastardizing art, but then embracing them. In Hollywood, prior
    villains have included talkies, the DVD, and CGI.
*   The deep learning models that power GenAI are massive, opaque, and hard to
    control. But commercial Al video and tool providers and the open source
    community are working hard to give professionals the fine-grained control they
    need. A non-exhaustive list of these efforts includes: training models with a richer
    understanding of visual terminology for more precise prompting; enabling
    conditioning of video models with both images and video; post-generation editing
    tools; ControlNets; fine-tuning; node-based editors; keyframe interpolation; and
    integration into existing edit suites/API support, among others.
*   Perhaps most important, the challenges in Hollywood are inadvertently pushing
    creatives toward AI. With 2024 in the rearview mirror, it's now clear that peak TV

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

*   is truly over. Neither production activity nor spend bounced back from strike-
    depressed levels in 2023. From here, overall video content spend is unlikely to
    grow faster than video revenue—which is to say, not much. At the same time,
    rising sports rights and a mix shift toward acquireds will put even more pressure
    on original content. Tack on studios' growing risk aversion and the path toward
    telling original stories in Hollywood is narrowing.
*   Many talk about AI as a democratizing technology, but for some established talent
    it may be a liberating technology too.
*   For a lot of people in Hollywood, AI still feels like a distant concern. As more
    talent embraces it, it will take on more urgency.

Thanks for reading The Mediator! Subscribe for
free to receive new posts and support my work.

## The Ice is Thawing

Many artists have spoken out against AI.

During the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, Justine Bateman was one of the
most vocal, saying that Al is "not about solving problems for people. It's about money.
It's about greed...” She also advocated for “[n]o generative Al in the entertainment
industry, period."

Glenn Close, Robert Downey Jr., and Scarlett Johansson are among the boldfaced
names who have also raised concerns. Here's Nicolas Cage:

"I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot reflect the
human condition for us. That is a dead end if an actor lets one Al robot manipulate
his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and
all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only. We
can't let that happen."

These are all actors, who have a lot to lose if synthetic actors eventually become viable.
Fewer directors or showrunners have gone on record, although a few months ago
Guillermo del Toro offered up this zinger:

"A.I. has demonstrated that it can do semi-compelling screensavers. That's
essentially that.... The value of art is not how much it costs and how little effort it
requires, it's how much would you risk to be in its presence? How much would
people pay for those screensavers? Are they gonna make them cry because they lost
a son? A mother? Because they misspent their youth? F*ck no."

Many believe that art and creativity are intrinsic to what makes us human and neither can nor
should be the domain of machines.

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

This wariness or hostility-whether motivated by fear, skepticism, or ideology-is
understandable. Al legitimately threatens to reduce or eliminate some (or possibly
many) jobs. Al video has produced a lot of cool experiments and even a few
commercial applications, such as ads and music videos. But it has yet to have its “Toy
Story moment"—that bolt-from-the-blue project that comes from outside the system,
shows the potential of the technology, and shakes up Hollywood. (I think this will
happen, but it hasn't yet.) It also still has a lot of noticeable flaws, most important that
it hasn't yet crossed the uncanny valley. Al humans still feel “off," robotic, often
creepy. Perhaps most fundamentally, many believe that art and creativity are intrinsic
to what makes us human and neither can nor should be the domain of machines.

But the ice is starting to thaw. The highest-profile signal yet is James Cameron joining
the board of Stability AI, a few months ago. The Russo brothers, filmmakers behind
some of the most successful MCU films, are building an Al studio. A few weeks ago,
Pouya Shahbazian, producer of the Divergent films, launched Staircase Studios, which
aims to use Al to create 30 films over the next four years, using human actors and
writers (and paying them union scale wages). Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced
the Transformer films, is an adviser. James Lamont and Jon Foster, two-thirds of the
writing team behind Paddington in Peru, will team up to write a full-length version of
the AI-animated short Critterz.

I'm aware of many other household names who are also experimenting with AI. Over
the next year, I expect that more well-known creatives will publicly embrace it.

Let's talk about why this is inevitable.

## Creatives Often Reject, and Then Embrace, New Technologies

There is a long (long, long) history of creatives initially rejecting new technologies as
somehow cheapening or bastardizing the creative process. This was true even of the
Gutenberg printing press. Johannes Trithemius, a German monk, famously criticized
printing in his 1492 manuscript, De Laude Scriptorum ("In Praise of Scribes"):

"Printed books will never equal scribed books, especially because the spelling and
ornamentation of some printed books is often neglected. Copying requires greater
diligence."

This almost reflexive rejection can be traced through every technological innovation in
media.

Since the topic is Hollywood, let's stick with film. At the advent of “talkies" in the late
1920s, Mary Pickford, co-founder of United Artists and silent film actress, supposedly
said "Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo."
Charlie Chaplin added that “Talkies are spoiling the oldest art in the world—the art of
pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence."

In 1982, Jack Valenti, Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America,
testified in Congress in favor of bills to ban the VCR:

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

"[T]his property that we exhibit in theaters, once it leaves the post-theatrical
markets, it is going to be so eroded in value by the use of these unlicensed
machines, that the whole valuable asset is going to be blighted. In the opinion of
many of the people in this room and outside of this room, blighted, beyond all
recognition...I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the
American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

When renowned visual effects artist Phil Tippett, who specialized in stop-motion
animation, first saw computer generated imagery (CGI), he says his reaction was “I've
just become extinct."

All eventually embraced what they initially rejected. Pickford went on to star in
talkies; Chaplin's most commercially successful film was The Great Dictator, his first
sound film, which was nominated for five Academy Awards; the VCR birthed the
home entertainment market, which at its peak in the mid-2000s was almost three
times as big as the theatrical box office; and Tippett won an Academy Award for Best
Visual Effects for overseeing the CGI work on Jurassic Park.

It's easy to anticipate the pushback here and why AI is different. None of these
technologies replaced the humanity in the art they just changed the way that art is
expressed or monetized. That is true. But Al doesn't necessarily eliminate human
artistry either.

## The Progression of Creative Control

Last year, author Ted Chiang wrote a takedown of GenAI in an essay in The New Yorker
titled "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art,” arguing that “to create a novel or painting,
an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence." The
operative word is choices. This criticism, and, for that matter, a lot of criticism of AI
(including del Toro's quote above) is based on a common misconception or gross
oversimplification: that using Al definitionally means giving up the ability to make
creative choices.

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In the first iterations of most GenAI tools, they necessitated giving up creative control.

One reason for this misconception is that in the first iterations of most GenAI tools, it
was mostly true. Most were zero-shot: you put in a prompt and a fully-formed (and
mostly soulless) poem, story, essay, image, video, or song belched out the other end.
Creatives had very little control. But that wasn't a design choice, that is a function of
how these models work. They are extraordinarily complex, so it is almost impossible
for a person to understand what they are doing and, likewise, it is hard for a person to
control their output.

Clearly, the set of use cases for which it makes sense to delegate all creative decisions to an AI
is necessarily a subset of the number of cases in which it makes sense to only delegate some.

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# Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

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That's a problem. For one thing, it's very limiting. Clearly, the set of use cases for which it makes sense to delegate all creative decisions to an Al is necessarily a subset of the number of cases in which it makes sense to only delegate some. It might do the trick for stuff that is formulaic, short, purely informative, or perhaps the high-calorie, low-nutrient junk food of the internet, but that's not most stuff. (It's kind of like asking: could you make a tasteless brown food brick that contains most necessary macronutrients? You could, but that's not usually the criteria people use when choosing food.) It won't work for any creative use case for which the humanity, craft, provenance, or backstory matter—in other words, most stuff.

For another, professional creatives expect and need control. To address this limitation, providers of proprietary Al video models and tools and the open source community are hard at work trying to provide finer-grained creative control. Staying on top of all these advancements is essentially impossible, especially when you consider all the activity in open source, which is effectively continuous. Instead, let's talk about how creative control will improve conceptually. Here's a non-exhaustive list.

*   Richer understanding of visual language for more precise prompting. Developers are providing video generation models a richer understanding of the terminology associated with visual styles, lighting, angle, camera lenses, depth of field, film stock, textures, and camera motion, etc., which enables creatives to use more technically precise prompts. This has been achieved in part by training models on video that has been annotated with richer metadata and through "manipulation in the latent space.” (Without getting into the technical details, in this context the latter means learning which parameters are associated with different visual elements post training and then manipulating these parameters during inference.) As an example, check out the new MiniMax T2V-01-Director Model below.

The document includes an image of a YouTube video thumbnail. The thumbnail shows a futuristic cityscape with a car driving through it. The video title is "Hailuo Al | T2V-01-Director Model: Control Your Camera Like a Pro!" There is a "Copy link" button below the video.

[Watch on ►YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/)

*   Image-to-video/video-to-video pre-conditioning. Many models, like Kling, Runway Gen-3, Veo 2, MiniMax, Hunyuan Video, and Sora, make it possible to provide a conditioning image in addition to the text prompt (although some are better at it than others). That could be a photograph, digital art, the output of an Al image generation model, or even hand drawn images. As described above, video diffusion models are guided by a text prompt. In the case of image-to-video models, the control image is processed as another type of embedding (a "visual

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*   conditioning" embedding). When the model generates video, it is guided by both the text prompt and the conditioning image. Similarly, some models also support video-to-video. In this case, the model uses the entire video clip as a conditioning input, where each frame of the reference video guides the generation of each corresponding frame in the output video.
*   Guidance weight. Many commercial models that support multiple conditioning inputs also give users flexibility how much to weight those inputs, such as through sliders or dials. For instance, an image-to-video model might include a slider that enables the user to dictate how much the model maintains fidelity to the reference image vs. the prompt.
*   Post-generation edits. Some models also make it possible to regenerate part of a video with guidance from the user after it has been generated, with features like in-painting, masking or brushes. In masking, for instance, the creator can mask off a portion of the video, put in a text prompt, and the model applies that text prompt only to the masked portion of the image. That makes it possible to edit a video without regenerating the whole thing. Runway offers the widest array of brushes and masks.
*   ControlNets. ControlNet-style approaches, which are currently only available with open source models (like Stable Diffusion and Flux), are a more specialized form of conditioning. For instance, they allow control channels for depth (MiDaS), edge detection (Canny), and pose information (OpenPose)—similar to how ControlNet works for images. This allows users to precisely guide how characters move or how scenes are structured spatially during inference.
*   Fine-tuning. It's also possible to fine-tune models by conditioning them with small, specialized datasets. These might include specific people, artistic styles or products. This is also prevalent in open source, where the current state of the art technique is called LoRA, or Low Rank Adaptation. (Runway is also working with Lionsgate to create models fine-tuned on Lionsgate's IP.) LoRA influences the generation process by making slight adjustments to the model, allowing it to "remember" specific elements from the fine-tuning dataset without retraining the whole model.
*   Node-based editors. Node-based editors are visual, modular interfaces that are commonly used in graphic design and VFX. They break down the video generation process into multiple steps (separate "nodes”), each of which can be precisely controlled (see the sample below). For instance, they make it possible to adjust prompts, include negative prompts, re-scale images, choose among different Al models, include ControlNets, add LoRAs, etc., and adjust the weights of all these different components. For now, they are more prevalent in open source, led by ComfyUI, but a new workflow tool called Flora enables node-based design with support for commercial models.

[https://archive.ph/efPY0](https://archive.ph/efPY0)

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# Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

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The document includes an image of a node-based editor interface. The interface is complex, with many interconnected nodes and lines. The nodes represent different steps in the video generation process, such as loading images, encoding video, and decoding video. The lines represent the flow of data between the nodes. The image also includes a preview of the generated video.

*   Multi-modal coordination (audio synchronization). This entails training models with explicitly aligned audio-visual datasets. One of the main challenges with AI models today is naturalistic looking speech, especially lip sync. By training models with datasets of people speaking and the corresponding audio tracks, the model learns to pair subject movements with corresponding speech waveforms. Hedra recently released its Character-3 model, which creates video from a reference image and voice, syncing the voice track with facial and head movements and body gestures. Runway's Act One (shown below) allows the user to sync up the facial movement and speech from reference video with an image, thereby animating the image.

The document includes an image of a YouTube video thumbnail. The thumbnail shows a person speaking. The video title is "Introducing Act-One | Runway". There is a "Copy link" button below the video.

[Watch on ►YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/)

*   Hybrid workflows. Professionals are increasingly developing their own proprietary combination of tools: like starting with Imagen or Midjourney for image generation, then Kling, MiniMax, or Veo 2 for different elements of the video generation, then upscaling via Topaz, then voice generation using Eleven Labs, etc. The flexibility to mix and match tools is another source of control.
*   Integration into existing edit suites/API support. Integrating AI video generation models into existing edit suites will flatten the learning curve for professional editors, who use those tools every day. It will also make it a lot easier to integrate real footage with Al elements seamlessly. (Incidentally, that will make it increasingly hard for viewers to tell what's AI and what's not.) Last year, Adobe

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# Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

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demoed the idea of including support for third-party plugins in Premiere Pro and After Effects (and they recently struck deals to support image generation tools from Black Forest Labs, Google, and Runway in some products). Blackmagic Design has also announced plans to integrate video generation tools into DaVinci Resolve. Stability AI offers API access to their video models, allowing developers to build custom interfaces and integrate generation capabilities into specialized workflows. Pika and Runway similarly provide API access that lets technical teams build custom interfaces or plug into existing editing software.

For an auteur who will only adopt AI if it is as versatile as physical production, will all that collectively be enough? Probably not yet. But with the collective resources of Google, OpenAI, Adobe, Runway, Tencent, and the open source community, among others, all marshalled toward providing creatives more control, we're heading that way. For Al-curious professionals who are willing to adapt their workflows, we're getting very close.

## Hollywood's Woes May Leave Little Choice

To use suitably cinematic language, Hollywood's problems are also inadvertently driving creatives into the waiting arms of AI.

There has always been tension between studios and talent. In a moment of candor, even some of the most successful writers, directors, showrunners, and producers will admit they'd like to reduce their reliance on the big studios. Working with the studios has always required tradeoffs.

Since making film and TV is expensive and the studios put up most or all of the money, they (understandably) exert a lot of control. They often weigh in or override creative decisions. They may kill projects for seemingly capricious reasons or option IP and keep it stuck in perennial development hell. They may shift distribution or marketing strategies in ways that disadvantage films and series that creatives believe deserve better. They're also (again, understandably) stingy with profit participations, other than for the top 0.1% of talent. The economics of TV production, in particular, have deteriorated in recent years. Historically, creatives retained substantial upside if a show hit, but the shift to cost-plus models (in which the licensee takes on all the risk and keeps most or all of the upside) has meant that creatives no longer benefit to the same degree from a successful show.

Lately, however, it has gotten even harder to work in Hollywood, especially for anyone other than top talent, and it is unlikely to get much better. Many people talk about AI as a democratizing technology, but for some Hollywood creatives, it could prove a liberating technology too.

_Many people talk about AI as a democratizing technology, but for some Hollywood creatives, it could prove a liberating technology too._

## TV Has Well and Truly Peaked

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# Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

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One of the clear lessons of 2024 is that peak TV is over. Owing to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, production activity declined markedly in 2023. One of the surprises of 2024 was how little it bounced back. Here are a few charts to underscore the point. Figure 1 shows that U.S.-produced TV premieres actually declined in 2024 from 2023.

Figure 1. U.S.-Produced Premieres Fell Last Year

The document includes a bar chart titled "U.S. Produced TV Premieres". The chart shows the number of U.S. produced TV premieres from 2018 to 2024. The chart is broken down by AVOD, SVOD, Cable, and Broadcast. The chart shows that the number of U.S. produced TV premieres declined in 2024 from 2023. The chart also shows the change in premieres from 2024 vs. 2018. AVOD is up 88%, SVOD is up 128%, Cable is down 43%, and Broadcast is down 7%. The source is Luminate.

That could reflect the lingering effect of lower production activity in 2023—since production ground to a halt in 2023, fewer shows were ready to premiere in 2024. But there are other discouraging signs. Figure 2 shows data from ProdPro, illustrating that while production activity increased in 2024 from 2023, it was still well below 2022 levels.

Figure 2. Production Activity Bounced Back in 2024, But Still Well Behind 2023

The document includes a line chart titled "U.S. Productions Actively Filming". The chart shows the number of U.S. productions actively filming from week 1 to week 51. The chart includes data for 2022, 2023, and 2024. The chart shows that production activity increased in 2024 from 2023, but was still well below 2022 levels. The source is ProdPro.

Now that financial reporting for 2024 is complete, we can also look at spending levels from the biggest producers. Sometimes, trade publications and data providers track

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book content spend, but that can be deceptive. Book content costs are largely driven
by amortization of spending in prior years and are therefore a lagging indicator. Cash
spend is a more accurate reflection of current production activity.

As shown in Figure 3, I estimate that cash spend for Amazon, Apple, Disney, Fox,
NBCU, Netflix, Paramount, and WBD fell by $18 billion in (fiscal) 2023 and barely
bounced back in 2024. Figure 4 shows that after several years of elevated spending
levels, cash content spend is reverting back to historical levels of roughly 50% of total
video revenue. With all the media conglomerates focused on profitability and the
management of both Amazon and Apple reportedly pushing for development execs to
rein in spending growth, there is little reason to think that programming spend will
grow faster than video revenue for the foreseeable future.

Cash content spend is unlikely to grow much from here.

Feel free to pick your own forecast for industry revenue growth, but for reasons I've
explained before (see Video: Forecast the Money), I estimate that it will roughly be
flattish or, if up, only marginally. As a result, total cash content spend is unlikely to
grow much from 2024 levels.

Figure 3. Cash Spend Didn't Recover Much in 2024 Either

The image is a line graph titled "Global Content Spend Cash vs. Book". The y-axis is labeled "$ in Millions" and ranges from $0 to $140,000. The x-axis represents the years from 2018 to 2024. There are two lines on the graph: one labeled "Book" and the other labeled "Cash". The "Book" line starts at around $100,000 in 2018, dips slightly in 2020, and then rises to around $130,000 in 2022 before declining slightly in 2023 and 2024. The "Cash" line starts at around $90,000 in 2018, dips slightly in 2020, rises sharply to around $120,000 in 2021, and then declines sharply in 2023 before rising slightly in 2024.

Notes: Global content figures reflect the combination of Amazon (Prime Video original and
acquired only), Apple (TV+ only), CBS (pre-Viacom merger), Discovery (pre-WBD merger),
Disney, Fox, NBCU (ex. Sky), Netflix, Viacom/ViacomCBS/Paramount and Warner Bros.
Discovery. Does not adjust for non-calendar fiscal years (Disney is September, Fox is June).
Sources: Company reports, Author estimates.

Figure 4. Cash Content Spend Has Reverted to ~50% of Video Revenue

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The image is a line graph titled "Content Spend as % of Video Revenue". The y-axis is labeled with percentages ranging from 0% to 70%. The x-axis represents the years from 2018 to 2024. There are two lines on the graph: one labeled "Book Content as %" and the other labeled "Cash Content as %". The "Book Content as %" line starts at around 45% in 2018, rises slightly to around 50% in 2020, and then remains relatively stable around 50% for the rest of the period. The "Cash Content as %" line starts at around 40% in 2018, rises to around 55% in 2021, and then declines to around 45% in 2024.

(TV+ only), CBS (pre-Viacom merger), Discovery (pre-WBD merger), Disney, Fox, NBCU (ex.
Sky), Netflix, Viacom/ViacomCBS/Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. Note that it
assumes no incremental revenue for Amazon (assumes all Amazon Prime subscribers get Prime
Video) Does not adjust for non-calendar fiscal years (Disney is September, Fox is June).
Sources: Company reports, Author estimates.

Originals Spend Will Probably Fall

Within this envelope of roughly flattish overall content spend, spend on originals will
probably fall. That's because of both rising sports rights costs and a shift in favor of
acquireds over originals.

Figure 5. Sports Rights Likely to Increase Substantially in 2026

The image is a stacked bar graph titled "U.S. Sports Rights - Cash". The y-axis is labeled with dollar amounts ranging from $0 to $35,000. The x-axis represents the years from 2018 to 2027. Each bar is divided into several segments, representing different sports rights: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, OLYMPICS, MARCH MADNESS, CFP, and OTHER. The total height of the bars increases gradually from 2018 to 2025, and then increases sharply in 2026 and 2027. A text label "Full NBA Step Up and Olympics" is placed above the 2026 bar.

Sources: Public reports, Author estimates.

As shown in Figure 5, I estimate that cash sports rights costs are set to climb by $5
billion in 2026, owing to the impact of the 2026 Olympics and the first full year of the
new NBA contract, plus normal contractual escalators. That funding will need to come
from somewhere, with originals the most likely candidate.

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Acquireds are a much better bet and the conglomerates are now more willing to license to
competing streamers.

It is also likely that non-sports content spend shifts toward acquired and away from
originals. Originals have always been a tough bet, but there are arguably signs that the
ROI on original programming is in decline. Figure 6 shows Luminate data, illustrating
that on most streaming platforms, 2/3 or more of originals viewing comes from the top
20 original seasons on the platform. Since that doesn't distinguish between seasons of
the same series, originals viewership is probably even more concentrated in the top
series. (I wrote about why this is happening in Power Laws in Culture.) Very few
originals pay off.

Figure 6. Most Originals Viewing Comes from Few Shows

The image is a pie chart titled "Share of Original Series Viewership, H1 2024". The chart is divided into two categories: "Top 20 seasons" and "Other". The chart shows the percentage of viewership for each category on different streaming platforms: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, Max, Apple TV+, Disney+, and Peacock. For example, on Netflix, the top 20 seasons account for 69% of viewership, while other seasons account for 31%.

Sources: Luminate, via Variety VIP+.

A big surprise in 2023 was the so-called "Suits phenomenon.” NBCU licensed Suits, a
middle-of-the-road performer on the USA Network from 2011-2019, to Netflix. It went
on to become a huge hit for Netflix and the most streamed show of 2023. To put it in
perspective, according to Nielsen, that year Suits generated 58 billion minutes, more
than four times as much as Netflix's most-watched original that year, The Night Agent.

But it's not just Suits. As shown in in Figure 7, a growing proportion of streaming
viewing is coming from acquired content. Here, you can see that among the top 100
most streamed titles each quarter, 80% are now acquired. In Figure 8, you can see that
other than Bluey 2, all of the other top 10 most streamed titles last year previously aired
on other networks.

Figure 7. Acquired Content is Taking a Growing Share of Viewing

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM
Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

The image is a line graph titled "Licensed Content Share Among 100 Most Streamed Titles". The y-axis is labeled with percentages ranging from 0% to 90%. The x-axis is not labeled. The line on the graph represents the share of licensed content among the 100 most streamed titles. The line starts at around 55% and gradually increases to around 80%.

The Most-Streamed TV Series of 2024

The image is a table titled "The Most-Streamed TV Series of 2024". The table has four columns: Rank, Title, Outlet, and Minutes viewed (billions). The table lists the top 10 most-streamed TV series of 2024, along with their respective outlets and minutes viewed. For example, the top-ranked series is Bluey, which is available on Disney+ and has 55.62 billion minutes viewed.

Rank | Title | Outlet | Minutes viewed (billions)
------- | -------- | -------- | --------
1 | Bluey | Disney+ | 55.62
2 | Grey's Anatomy | Netflix/Hulu | 47.85
3 | Family Guy | Hulu | 42.44
4 | Bob's Burgers | Hulu | 36.80
5 | NCIS | Netflix/Hulu/Paramount+ | 35.91
6 | Young Sheldon | Max/Netflix/Paramount+ | 32.08
7 | The Big Bang Theory | Max | 29.12
8 | Law & Order: SVU | Peacock/Hulu | 28.72
9 | Criminal Minds | Paramount+/Hulu | 28.40
10 | SpongeBob SquarePants | Paramount+ | 27.87

Sources: Nielsen via Hollywood Reporter.

The growing dominance of acquireds coincides with growing willingness by the media
conglomerates to license their content to competing streamers. As shown in Figure 9,
2023 was a turning point in the conglomerates' approach to licensing. Over the last
few years, as the big media companies have turned their focus to profitability, all have
also shifted strategy away from retaining exclusive rights to their content and toward
selectively licensing. In recent earnings call, all doubled down on the view that
licensing (judiciously) makes sense.

With growing evidence that the ROI on acquired content is far better and the conglomerates
all loosening up their grip on their libraries, content budgets will likely shift toward stuff that
has already been made, not making new stuff.

Figure 9. 2023 Was a Turning Point in the Conglomerates' Willingness to License

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM
Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace Al - by Doug Shapiro

The image is a table listing various shows, their licensors, licensees, the year of the license, and significant terms.

Licensor | Shows | Licensee | Year | Significant Terms
------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | --------
Disney | Lost, The Wonder Years, Prison Break, White Collar, Archer | Netflix | 2023 | Non-exclusive (also on Hulu/Disney+), 18-month term
Disney | The Spiderwick Chronicles (canceled Disney+ original) | The Roku Channel | 2023 | Exclusive
WBD | Westworld, Raised by Wolves, F-Boy Island | Tubi, The Roku Channel | 2023 | Non-exclusive (also remains on Max)
WBD | Insecure, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under, Ballers | Netflix | 2023 | Non-exclusive (also remains on Max)
WBD | DC Films (Man of Steel, Wonder Woman, Justice League) | Netflix | 2023 | Non-exclusive, limited-window
WBD | Batman: Caped Crusader (animated series) | Amazon Prime Video | 2023 | Exclusive, two-season initial order
WBD | Dead Boy Detectives | Netflix | 2023 | Exclusive (originally planned for HBO Max)
Paramount | Star Trek: Prodigy | Netflix | 2023 | Exclusive (Season 2 premiere on Netflix after Paramount+ cancellation)
Paramount | School Spirits | Netflix | 2023 | Non-exclusive (simultaneous streaming on Paramount+)
Paramount | Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (Showtime) | Netflix | 2023 | Exclusive streaming after removal from Paramount+
NBCU | Suits | Netflix | 2023 | Non-exclusive (also available on Peacock; final season exclusive to Peacock initially)
NBCU | Girls5eva | Netflix | 2022 | Non-exclusive (initially Peacock original, Netflix co-producing Season 3 as exclusive)
NBCU | Bravo Series (Below Deck, Real Housewives) | Netflix | 2023 | Non-exclusive, selected seasons
NBCU | Universal Pictures Films (Jurassic World Dominion, The 355) | Amazon Prime Video | 2023 | Non-exclusive (initial Peacock window, later Amazon/Freevee window)

Hollywood is Risk Averse

So, aggregate budgets are unlikely to go up much; there will likely be a shift within
budgets towards sports and acquireds; and, to top it all off, within the pool of money
left over for originals, Hollywood is also becoming more risk averse and less willing to
bet on original stories.

I won't belabor this, because everyone in Hollywood feels it: the studios are taking
fewer chances. The term most associated with mid-budget films is "dying." Mid-
budget comedies in particular have all but disappeared. Despite their prevalence at the
Academy Awards, independent film is also struggling as the studios reduce acquisition
budgets.

But to put some numbers around it, according to Ampere Analysis, in 2024 more than
two-thirds of the top 100 movies and shows were based on existing IP. In September,
producer David Beaubaire released a study about Hollywood development activity,
showing that for the 505 major studio films greenlit for release between 2022-2026,
only 10% were from internal development. The other 90% were either external
packages (i.e., came with talent attached); sequels, remakes, or based on established IP;
distribution of third-party projects or of the studios' internal specialty arms. In other
words, there are very few new stories emerging from the majors. If you are a creator
and have an original idea, Al makes it possible to tell stories that Hollywood will no
longer finance.

Al makes it possible to tell stories that Hollywood will no longer finance.

Getting More Real

To a lot of people in Hollywood, AI still seems theoretical and, if a risk, a distant one.
But if established talent starts to embrace it, that risk will probably feel a lot more
clear and present. I think that will happen for all the reasons above: the historical
precedent is clear; the tools themselves are rapidly improving to provide the control

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# 4/23/25, 6:55 PM

Why Hollywood Talent Will Embrace AI - by Doug Shapiro

that professionals demand; and the traditional pathways for telling original stories are
narrowing.

For the industry, the question about AI is rapidly shifting from “if” to “what to do
about it."

1 This may sounds like a lot, but according to a report last year, there are over 500,000 people
employed in the U.S. television, film, and animation industries.

2 Bluey is also technically acquired, since Disney acquired the international streaming rights
from the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and the BBC, but it has not previously aired in the
U.S.

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*Comment by Phil Chacko*
Phil Chacko Mar 28 Edited

Totally agree with all of this! I started my tech career at Netflix and have been making tools for
storytellers ever since and am married to one. I love em!

Underneath all the salient frustration with Al is an undercurrent of frustration with the gatekeeping of
Hollywood, as it's assaulted by UGC platforms like YouTube and TikTok and hollowed out by increasing
competition for entertainment.

We've been starting at the other end of the spectrum -- hobbyists and YouTube creators -- before
working our way up to the needs of professional filmmakers, but it might be worth checking out the
Possible Studio (thepossible.io). Cheers!

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