Hollywood has been “cooked” for years now, according to AI fanatics, yet movies still remain largely human-made, and nothing even close to an AI-generated blockbuster has hit the silver screen.
Even certain filmmakers have also been guilty of overselling the tech’s capabilities. Take “Avengers: Endgame” director Joe Russo, who enthused in an interview with Collider that there would be a fully AI movie within “two years” — exactly three years ago.
Perhaps Russo was thinking of the direction his own filmography was headed in, which has felt increasingly AI-generated with each successive film. “The Gray Man” (2022) was a $200 million anonymous cobbling together of action set pieces reheated from better movies that not even Ryan Gosling could save. The Electric State (2025), which cost $320 million, could reasonably be accused of being written by ChatGPT, and its fake-movie aesthetic is a “make it EPIC!” AI-bowdlerization of the illustrated novel it was very loosely based on.
Russo — who sits on the board of several AI companies — and his brother Anthony, have been prominent voices for generative AI in an industry polarized by its intrusion, and in which even the mere hint of the tech being used in a film’s production is a potential mini-scandal.
In the Collider interview, he argued that AI will help with the “democratization of storytelling,” empowering up-and-coming artists who don’t have a lot of resources at their disposal.
He even predicted that audiences could use AI to shape what they were watching,
“You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform,” Russo said. “‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day,’ and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice.”
Though those prognostications have yet to pan out, Russo has remained an unwavering defender of AI. Shortly after the film’s release in early 2025, he proudly admitted to using AI-powered voice modulation in “The Electric State” — amid the film already receiving heaps of negative coverage for being unbelievably bad. He also claimed that the reason AI isn’t regularly used in Hollywood is because “people are afraid” and “don’t understand” the tech.
Russo is far from alone in claiming AI will transform the industry, and for better or worse, he’s probably right. But it’s clearly not happening at anywhere near the pace or magnitude that AI advocates predicted it would. AI may be used behind the scenes, but it’s nowhere near good enough to generate entire movies — not even the kind of slop that the Russos spit out.
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