AI Is Taking Over Movie Making And It's a Good Thing
This industry is about to change drastically, and I don't mean in five years. It's happening now. AI is taking over the video creation space, and the two things that matter about that takeover are where it's evolving and who it's letting in.
The takeover is already underway
AI-generated video is already better than VFX. I know how that sounds, so let me back it up.
I watched a VFX artist on YouTube run a competition against an AI video company. He put real work in flew to Iceland for the footage, top-tier dragon model, hired animator, water and smoke simulations, twelve-hour renders. The AI company took the same challenge and generated their version.
In my opinion, the AI created it better. And here's the thing it didn't even have to. By his own numbers, traditional rendering takes hours per frame and AI does the whole thing in seconds. At that gap, all AI had to do was make something where you couldn't easily guess which one was the AI. That alone wins, because nobody's paying a team of specialists for weeks when the alternative is the same afternoon. But it cleared that bar and then actually made the better video. When the tool that's thousands of times faster is also putting out the better result, that's not competition anymore. That's a takeover.
Where it's evolving: Genie 3
Video generation is only step one. The evolution is what really has my attention, and Genie 3 is the clearest picture of where this goes.
Genie 3 is a really interesting and revolutionary concept made real. It doesn't generate a video file it generates the world as you go. You move, it creates the next moment in real time. It runs around 720p at 24 frames per second and holds a coherent scene for minutes at a time. There's no saved layout anywhere. No level file, no 3D model, no pre-built map. Nothing exists until you get there, and what you change stays changed move an object, walk away, come back, and it's still where you left it, from the model's own learned dynamics, not a memory system somebody programmed.
In my opinion, this becomes the standard for VR. Every headset today runs on worlds somebody had to build first modeled, textured, lit, finished before you ever put the thing on. A world model deletes that whole pipeline. Put on the headset, describe where you want to be, and you're there, and it keeps existing as long as you keep exploring. That's the evolution track: generated clips today, generated worlds you stand inside tomorrow. Movie making and world making are converging into the same technology.
Should you still go to school for VFX? Yes.
This is where people expect me to say the field is dead. It's not, and I'll say it the same way I say it about code.
AI can write better code than most developers now. That doesn't mean you skip learning the concepts and the basic math it means the opposite. You need the fundamentals to know whether what the AI gave you is right. Same exact thing here. Go learn VFX in the traditional sense. Learn lighting, learn compositing, learn how motion is supposed to look. Not because you'll be hand-rendering frames for a living, but because those fundamentals are how you judge and direct what the AI produces.
The genie needs someone who knows how to wish
AI is a genie it grants the wish exactly as you asked it, not as you meant it.
If I ask the AI to make a video of a dragon jumping off a waterfall, and a trained pro asks for the same scene, the raw quality coming out of the model is the same. But mine gets lost in the flow. No build-up, no reason the camera sits where it sits, no moment that makes you feel anything. So the expertise didn't disappear it moved. Knowing how to generate the scene is where the value is now. That's the new craft, and it's exactly what the fundamentals I just told you to go learn feed into.
Who it's letting in
Not all change is a bad thing, and this is the part of the takeover I'm genuinely excited about.
Movie creation just opened up to the masses. An indie film creator without a big-studio budget can now make something comparable to what the big studios put out. Small teams, solo creators, people with nothing but an idea the door is open. And they bring fresh ideas, because they were never inside the system that recycles the same ones. Some of the most interesting stuff I watch right now is coming out of the small-form AI space, from exactly these people. The takeover isn't concentrating power in the industry. It's spreading it.
Embrace it
So that's my read. AI is taking this space over, the tech is evolving from video clips toward real-time worlds, and the door that used to require a studio budget is now open to anyone.
We're at the very beginning. Embrace the future, get your fundamentals, learn how to make the wish and go find your niche. There's room for everyone right now.