Technological revolutions rarely destroy industries. More often, they destroy the reason those industries used to exist. Photography did not…

Technological revolutions rarely destroy industries. More often, they destroy the reason those industries used to exist. Photography did not destroy painting. It destroyed painting’s monopoly on realism. AI may do something similar to cinema’s monopoly on expensive-looking images. Painting was seen as a means to reproduce reality for most of history. Then photography arrived and created an effectively infinite supply of realism. Painting was freed from realism. Once realism became abundant painters stopped optimizing for it. They moved towards impressionism, abstraction, cubism, expressionism and a hundred other directions and new experimental territories. The camera and photography killed painting’s most economically valuable function at the time. I feel something very similar may be happening with film right now. For the last few decades Hollywood has been operating in a world where visual spectacle was scarce. A giant battle scene, dinosaurs, collapsing cities, zombies, impossible camera movements, all of these required enormous amounts of money, labor and technical expertise. And because they were scarce, they became valuable. This creates an interesting incentive. If audiences pay attention to spectacle, and spectacle is expensive, then studios can use spending itself as a competitive advantage. IOW, the budget becomes part of the product. A useful way to think about modern blockbusters is that they are selling expensive frames. The average frame contains more explosions, more creatures, more destruction, more motion, more fighting, more visual information than was previously possible. A 300 million budget buys access to frames that smaller competitors literally cannot manufacture. Consider a 300 million film of 90 minutes or 5,400 seconds at a standard 24fps. You have 129,600 frames in total. Each frame will cost you on average 2,315 dollars. That’s a frame, not even a second. There are 24 frames in a second. So a single second is ~55,556 dollars. If spectacular frames generate attention, then the industry naturally evolves toward producing increasingly spectacular frames but not because anyone consciously decided this was good art. Mostly becuse competitive markets reward whatever captures attention. Traditionally, there was a large cost difference between filming two people having coffee and filming two people having coffee while dinosaurs fight flying sharks behind them. With sufficiently capable AI/generative models, that difference trends toward zero. The cost of the frame becomes detached from the complexity of the image or what is happening in the frames. When anyone can generate a city exploding, a dragon attack, an alien invasion, or a thousand extras running through a battlefield, spectacle ceases to be a differentiator. The moment everyone can afford expensive-looking frames, expensive-looking frames stop being expensive. And when a formerly scarce resource becomes abundant, markets start searching for new scarcities. Which is really interesting from an artistic POV. In a strange way, AI may not push filmmaking toward more spectacle. It may push it toward less because spectacle becomes free. Maybe what we’re witnessing is not the automation of filmmaking but the commoditization of spectacle.

Source: Cristobal Valenzuela (X) | 2026-06-22