I was 8 years old when I saw it Star Wars In theaters in the summer of 1977. When that Star Destroyer crawled across the screen in the opening scene, I had never seen anything like it. No one had. In the crowded movie theater, the noise of our group was interrupted. For two hours, I lived in a galaxy far, far away as George Lucas showed me something I could only imagine before that moment.
This feeling was called, though I didn’t know it at the time: panic.
After a year, Superman flew and we really believed that man could fly. Then he came Blade Runner, Tron, aliens, and Terminator 2. In 1993, Steven Spielberg and Steve “Spaz” Williams gave us Industrial Light & Magic Jurassic Park and the most realistic dinosaurs we’ve ever seen. Williams’ groundbreaking work changed the course of cinema forever. Matrix gave us “shot time”. Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings the trilogy created the whole world. Marvel movies have surprised us.
What made them magical was simple: We had never seen anything like them.
With the progress we’ve made, we’ve inadvertently broken the spell.
Limits that did magic
For most of the history of cinema there has been a barrier between imagination and image. We could dream fantastic things, but we couldn’t visualize them. This limitation was the secret ingredient of the film’s magic. It caused a defect. And scarcity is what makes something valuable, not abundance. If everyone drove a Lamborghini, it would be just one car.
CGI cleared the first hurdle. Suddenly, we could picture the impossible. But there was a second problem: cost. Only studios spending hundreds of millions can deliver high quality visuals. There was also a third barrier: access. We had to go to theaters to watch these performances, which made them social events, shared cultural moments.
Netflix has an amazing series, The films that made us. I love it because it speaks to my experience and the experience of many others. Movies made us because these shared cultural experiences connected us deep within ourselves and deep within others. There won’t be teenagers 30 years from now “In Memes who made us” because who we are and what binds us together cannot be found in a divided context.
Stream solved the problem of access. We can visually watch the blockbuster from our couches. Then we reduced the shock on our iPhones to six inches. When we saw everything, everywhere, everything at once, our minds couldn’t help but be enthralled.
But one final hurdle remained: someone had to actually do it professionally.
This last hurdle just fell.
When someone can create the next avengers
Last month, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, an artificial video generation tool so powerful that Hollywood to be in a panic. Disney and Paramount sent a cease and desist letter. SAG-AFTRA condemned it. Co-writer of Deadpool Rhett Reese said “In the near future, one person will be able to sit in front of a computer and make a movie that is no different than what Hollywood is producing now.”
My X feed is filled with AI-generated action: Predator vs. Terminator, Homelander vs. Superman, Bruce Lee, and Godzilla. They all look like a $200 million studio production. They are built into laptops.
The problem is gone. Now anyone can create what only billion dollar studios could produce a few years ago. And when everyone can make movie magic, the magic is gone.
Now the entire film and television industry has gone up. Longhorn co-star Matthew McConaughey sits down with Timothée Chalamet CNN and the Variety campus hall at UT Austin recently and told a room full of students about AI: “It’s coming. It’s already here. Don’t deny it.”
A recent article by Matt Schumer, Something big is happeningit went viral for a reason. And it’s not just happening in Hollywood: Every aspect of our civilization is being revolutionized at an exponential rate—medicine, science, coding, educationentertainment, law, politics…everything
The popcorn problem
Here’s another way to think about what’s going on. Something pairs with movies like nothing else: popcorn. A great movie with popcorn is a complete experience. They go together perfectly.
But what happens when we eat too much popcorn? We’ve all been there. Halfway through the bucket, we feel bloated, greasy, and a little sick. What enhanced the experience in small doses ruined it in excess. This is not an argument against popcorn. This argument against popcorn is overwhelming.
This is the problem with our screens. It’s not that we’re above them at all. This is why we are too much for them. We have YouTube videos that we could watch for thousands of lifetimes. When we consume the highest quality we can biologically tolerate, more of it does not make us happier. Our brains have moment-to-moment ceilings for pleasure and stimulation. For millions of years, the natural world has kept us at this threshold. Now we max out before lunch.
What happens to our waistlines happens to our spirits.
When archetypes are boring
It’s not just visuals. Archetypes are also tired. We’ve seen the hero’s journey so many times that we could write it in our sleep: Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Neo, Spider-Man, and Katniss Everdeen.
Marvel’s villains are already destroying the universe. How big could the threat be? We’ve seen buildings explode, worlds end, and universes collapse. We have hit the ceiling and there is no going through it.
We have seen “the hero of a thousand faces” a million times. Potential prayers are now predictable. Just as it’s almost impossible to create a new kind of music that matches what we’ve already heard, the storytelling has hit a wall. With millions of people now generating content, all the major combinations that come together have already been done.
In October 2025, a document of the country generated by AI was called Call breaking It topped the Billboard Digital Singles Chart. The number one country song in America was produced entirely by artificial intelligence. There is no future. Here it is.
Why can’t we see what’s going on?
Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson got it: “The real problem with humanity is this: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godless technology.” We are cavemen piloting a spaceship. And physicist Albert Bartlett called our fatal flaw: “The greatest flaw of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
We suffer evolutionary blindness. We didn’t evolve to understand exponential change because nothing in our ancestral environment changed that fast. We have forgotten who we are.
A real loss
What we’re really missing isn’t just the magic of the movie. We lose the experience of wonder itself. When I watched that Star Destroyer roll overhead in 1977, my 8-year-old mind was stretched to accommodate something entirely new. This experience disappears in a world where everything is instantly accessible and repeatable.
My favorite line from my favorite movie always rings in my mind. In bullet runner replicant Roy Batty does not use his death breath anger against men, but to mourn his beauty, to witness it:
“All these moments are lost in time, like tears in the rain.”
A car, mourning lost surprise. If that doesn’t describe where we are, nothing will.
The Hollywood we know and love is history. We can’t stop it. But we can change what comes next. Because the real magic was never the technology. It was a shared experience of wonder.
When everyone saw it Raiders of the Lost Arkconnect us It was something deeper than entertainment. Friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford and a wonderful team brought us the magic of the movie. It was a relatable experience of wonder. As we fragment into millions of bubbles of personalized content, each producing our own spectacles, we lose the connective tissue that holds us together.
Steven Spielberg told the audience at SXSW in Austin this week: “I’m not in favor of AI replacing human creativity.” He is right. We cannot allow our creative spirits or our shared experience to be destroyed by AI.
Magic has never been in technology. It was seeing something we had never seen before. together We can’t stop what’s coming. But we can fight to hold on to what’s most important: the stories that connect us and the fears we share side by side. The question is not how we save Hollywood. That’s how we save each other.
