Artificial intelligence has been a part of Hollywood for some time, but 2025 marked the year it truly asserted its influence. The entertainment industry has long employed various AI tools for post-production tasks, such as de-aging actors and eliminating green screen backgrounds. These technologies have often served as valuable aids for artists engaged in meticulous work that would otherwise be time-consuming. However, this year, Hollywood began embracing generative AI that primarily produces text-to-video content, which currently lacks significant applications in standard production processes. Despite the substantial investments and efforts, no generative AI project has yet demonstrated why it deserves the buzz it’s receiving.

The integration of AI into Hollywood didn’t initially appear promising. Studios seemed poised to take legal action against AI companies because the video generation models were evidently trained on copyrighted materials. Major studios like Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery did indeed file lawsuits against these AI developers for this reason. Yet, instead of crushing these AI companies, Hollywood’s major players opted to collaborate with them. While the outcomes of these partnerships are just beginning to unfold, early indications suggest a future filled with more chaotic developments.

This year, while large entities such as Google and OpenAI dominated AI-related headlines, smaller companies also sought to make their mark in the entertainment sector. Asteria, the startup founded by Natasha Lyonne, aimed to create films using ethically designed AI models, and Showrunner, an Amazon-backed platform, allowed subscribers to generate animated “shows” from simple descriptions. These fledgling companies were eager to prove that their version of generative AI could enhance film and TV development while reducing production costs.

Despite Asteria’s initial buzz, it had little to show publicly following its first film announcement, and skepticism abounded about Showrunner’s ability to attract paying customers with its rudimentary animations. It appeared that Showrunner’s ultimate goal was to forge lucrative partnerships with established studios like Disney, integrating their technology into platforms that allow users to create personalized content featuring well-known characters from major franchises.

Initially, the notion seemed far-fetched as Showrunner’s output resembled basic JibJab-style animations. However, Disney soon signaled its willingness to experiment with such content, despite the limitations of current text-to-video generators. In December, Disney inked a three-year, billion-dollar licensing agreement with OpenAI, enabling users of the Sora platform to create AI-generated videos featuring 200 characters from franchises like Star Wars and Marvel.

Netflix emerged as one of the first major studios to fully embrace generative AI. After employing the technology for special effects in one of its original series, Netflix released a set of guidelines for partners interested in adopting AI-generated content. While not mandatory, the guidelines emphasized cost-saving benefits in visual effects production. Following Netflix’s lead, Amazon released several Japanese anime series that suffered from poor localization due to the absence of human translators and voice actors in the dubbing process.

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.

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.