When Hollywood and Silicon Valley Collide

David Ellison just scored Paramount, and word is he's eyeing Warner Bros. next. When you combine that media empire with his father Larry's AI infrastructure, we're looking at creative destruction on a scale the industry hasn't seen since the transition from silent films to talkies.

While everyone else argues about whether AI will kill creativity, James Cameron's been quietly running his own experiments in the Avatar labs. The guy who gave us Skynet is now building his own version of artificial intelligence – just one that makes movies instead of hunting humans.

Cameron believes AI works best as the ultimate production assistant. The intern who never sleeps, never complains, and can handle grunt work that usually burns through months of production time.

His team feeds AI models the tedious stuff that makes grown VFX artists weep. Pre-vis blocking that would normally take weeks? AI cranks it out in hours. Camera movement tests, lighting simulations, rough storyboards – all the foundational work that clears the runway for takeoff.

Cameron’s using AI to generate crowd scenes and environment fills. Remember those armies of digital artists working 80-hour weeks to populate backgrounds? Now machines handle that heavy lifting while human artists focus on what they do best – the subtle character expressions, the perfect lighting that sells an emotional beat, those tiny details that make audiences believe in Pandora.

In post-production, Cameron's AI tackles the soul-crushing work that nobody wants to do anyway. Rotoscoping drudgery, texture cleanup, background detail fills – all automated. This frees his collaborators to dive deeper into character work, ecosystem design, and narrative experimentation within those virtual sets he helped pioneer.

Cameron's betting this approach will slash production timelines and VFX budgets while opening doors to bigger, wilder worlds. He draws clear boundaries. No AI that copies specific artists' styles. No algorithms pretending to generate genuine emotion or story truth. The soul of filmmaking stays human, period.

Now picture this Cameron method scaled across David Ellison's expanding media empire, backed by Silicon Valley's deepest pockets. Traditional studios are about to face competition from operations that can prototype faster, iterate quicker, and test more story variations than ever before. 

When you can spin up pre-vis in hours instead of weeks, when you can explore twenty different visual approaches to a scene before committing to one, when you can build worlds faster than ever – that changes everything.

I keep thinking about what this means for the actual humans making the stories. The optimistic view? We get to focus on the stuff machines can't do – character depth, emotional truth, the weird human insights that make stories stick. The realistic view? The lines at the North Hollywood unemployment office are about to stretch around the block. As with every tech revolution, some jobs will disappear. But this time, will others be created? I don’t think so.

AI isn’t coming to Hollywood. It's already here, running experiments in Cameron's labs and powering tools across the industry. Will they be used to tell better stories? Or just cheaper ones, where the real cost is to the economic security of thousands of talented craftspeople.