The Year AI Began To Shape Hollywood

When the nominations for the 97^th Academy Awards were announced on January 23, 2025, Hollywood let out some audible gasps.

Despite their use of AI, The Brutalist and Emelia Peréz both received multiple nominations — 10 for the former and 13 for the latter. These included Best Picture for both, and Best Actor for The Brutalist (Adrien Brody) and Best Actress (Karla Sofia Gascón) for Emelia Peréz.

But, in both films — and both Best Actor nominations — the vocal presentations of the actors were not just the work of the actors, they had been modified by an AI program, Respeecher.

In the case of The Brutalist, it was used in post-production to enhance the Hungarian pronunciation of Brody and Felicity Jones, Best Supporting Actress nominee. (He’s from Woodhaven, NY; she’s from Birmingham, England.)

In the case of Emelia Peréz, Gascón’s vocal range was expanded to reflect the changes of the character from a man to a woman.

In March, though Gascón did not get the nod, Brody did win the Best Actor Oscar. Evidently the AI-adjustment wasn’t a deal-breaker.

Fast forward to late July when AI production studio Particle6 posted a two-minute video titled “AI Commissioner” on YouTube. Particle6, based in London, was introducing a new actor “Tilly Norwood” who they describe as “our fully screen-ready AI actress, designed for any role and always ready to perform.”

Norwood is represented by Xicoia, a spin-off of Particle6. Xicoia is a “talent” agency for AI. And not programmers. The agency’s most notable talent, star of “AI Commissioner,” didn’t cause a mere gasp from Hollywood but a shrill yell of dismay.

As SAG-AFTRA put it, in part, in a statement released on September30:

“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor; it’s a character produced by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion.”

That synthetic actress had garnered a whole lot of attention after Particle6 had announced three days earlier at the Zurich Film Festival Summit that Xicoia was in talks with non-synthetic talent agencies that wanted to represent Tilly Norwood. Seems like life experience or not, Norwood was seen to have box office potential beyond two minutes on YouTube. Not being real wasn’t a deal-breaker, either.

Before 2025 was out, before The Velvet Sundown could post its rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” on Spotify, the AI-Hollywood issue was elevated to a degree that made people in Hollywood wish for the good old days of bitching about Respeecher.

December 11 may go down in Hollywood history as a watershed moment: The Walt Disney Company — the purveyor of brands including Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars — announced a three-year licensing deal with OpenAI, a firm whose ChatGPT has more than 500 million weekly users and which is to the AI development community as Disney is to movie-making: ubiquitous and relentless.

The arrangement is exclusive for one year, after which Disney can come to agreements with other AI companies (although given that Disney recently sent Google a cease-and-desist letter accusing the tech company of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” — to train its Gemini and Veo AI products — odds are there won’t be a whole lot of shopping other AI companies).

With this agreement, Disney is allowing you to make Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader videos. Any member of the public can use Sora to create videos using Disney IP: that’s over 200 characters from the aforementioned brands, as well as the environments, props and other elements that create animated authenticity.

Disney is even allowing the use of the character upon which its empire has been constructed: Mickey Mouse. Realize that while the mouse character in Steamboat Willie is now in the public domain, the modern Mickey (e.g., the version used, for example, in Fantasia) is still under copyright protection. That means he wasn’t kidding about the scope when Bob Iger said of the agreement:

Bringing together Disney’s iconic stories and characters with OpenAI’s groundbreaking technology puts imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in ways we’ve never seen before.

“Never seen before” is undoubtedly putting it mildly. If Ralph Bakshi was still making films, this would be a more extraordinary moment. Here are a couple reasons why this is a significant moment.

First, in 2025 Disney has a dominant share of the top-10 box office grosses, and every one of those movies are ripe for digital remixing. Going forward, might the AI platform be the foundation upon which movies like Lilo & Stitch and The Fantastic Four are built?

Second, Disney isn’t just agreeing to work with OpenAI. It is investing a billion dollars into the company.

Look for it to leverage the technology in all the ways it can to generate more money, ranging from premium options for fans who are making their 20-second Sora videos, to new AI supplements for existing shows, to wholesale new product it can put on Disney+.

There is another element about this that needs to be taken into account.

One of the things that is prohibited in the Sora setup is the use of actor likenesses and voices. This is in keeping with the SAG-AFTRA rules negotiated in 2023 — after the 118-day strike.

SAG-AFTRA and the studios go back to the bargaining table in mid-2026.

And the 2026 negotiations — largely because of AI — are going to make 2023’s efforts look like a walk in the park.

The current contract language, understandably, protects “real” actors from being digitally exploited by the studios. As in:

If a producer plans to make a computer-generated character that has a main facial feature — like eyes, nose, mouth, or ears — that clearly looks like a real actor, and they use that actor’s name and face to prompt the AI system to do this, they must first get permission from that actor and agree on how this character will be used in the project.

But what if the actor in question is Tilly Norwood? As she isn’t “real,” she’s already (and always) ready for her close-up.

You can already hear the studio talking points forming, echoing Iger’s rhetoric about AI as an “important moment” for the industry. Faced with this so-called inflection point, is the union going to be cast as a band of Luddites defending a vaudeville-era labor model in a Silicon Valley economy?

For the sake of its members, SAG-AFTRA will say yes — and it probably must. But the implication is obvious. If studios can generate large portions of movies without hiring armies of actors (not to mention support technicians), why wouldn’t they? Many Disney franchises barely rely on visible humans anyway — masked, helmeted, or fully animated.

The company isn’t investing a billion bucks — and getting the right to buy more OpenAI should it so desire — because it wants to become more fan-friendly. Iger: “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry.”

This AI play will make movie-making an entirely different undertaking. And, it’s not just Disney. Where the Mouse leads, the others will follow. Let’s not forget that Paramount is under the control of David Ellison, whose father, Larry, is the founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world. Do you think he’s going to let Disney have a tech advantage in movie-making?

When the studios and SAG-AFTRA meet next year, it is, in effect, going to be Tech vs. Talent, and it isn’t looking particularly good for the latter.

It won’t be long until people look back at The Brutalist and Tilly Norwood and think: “Wasn’t that quaint?”