The End of Hollywood is an Opportunity for Catholics

As much as I find AI abhorrent, if it actually destroys the Hollywood film industry, it will have done everyone on the planet a great service!

From Crisis

By Mike Parrott

AI, Digital Actors, and the Future of Storytelling

I signed my last SAG contract in 2021.

That was intentional. After a grueling year managing what was at the time the largest production budget in independent film history, I needed a break. Cabrini was to be my last full-time project before turning to academic pursuits, though the part-time film consulting never fully subsided. What I did not foresee then was the dissolution of the Screen Actors Guild altogether (along with its sister guilds for writers, directors, producers, production crew, editors, teamsters, and the rest).

For more than 100 years, filmmaking has been bound by the physical world: the limits of camera lenses, lighting effects, sound waves, set construction, even human endurance. And hovering over every project, the greatest enemy of most producers, writers, and directors – budgets. Now, AI has liberated filmmaking from physics and financiers alike.

Hyper-realistic AI video generation marks the liberation of the human imagination from the limits of production mechanics. The filmmaking bottleneck has shifted upstream, away from technical execution, residing now at the purely creative level. Anything can now be visualized, practically instantly. What will remain of Hollywood’s (already attenuating) power?

And what of the economics of entertainment? Many readers will recall with great fondness visiting the “New Release” wall at Blockbuster Video on Friday nights. Some will even remember the realization of scarcity – no copies left! – for popular titles. While it is true the post-Netflix digital age has eliminated this release scarcity, what do the economics of content creation look like without any scarcity at all?

The Traditional Hollywood Model 

Once upon a time (3 months ago), motion picture production demanded massive capital investment (sets, crews, equipment), to say nothing of control over distribution channels. In such an environment, the “Star System” functioned as a hedge against risk. Building films around celebrity actors would practically guarantee a good return on investment. As a former film producer I knew at one time, for example, Kevin James’s “value” in Germany – and I could bank that value as part of the financing plan. 

What is his value today, when anyone can use her iPhone to generate James’s likeness into any scene she wishes?

A penultimate project-based business, Hollywood has been populated by unionized labor ecosystems (SAG, DGA, IATSE, WGA) for generations. Filmmakers and film crews assembled these unions to protect against the boom and bust each film person lives through every year. When you’re working, cash flow is great, but not everyone is always working, and some rarely work.

Studios have erred in recent years toward franchises. Huge productions with budgets of $250 million or more dominate the film landscape. Fewer new ideas find their way to your digital subscription of choice, and practically none arrive at the silver screen. The industry has depended heavily on familiar franchises and celebrity branding to offset financial risk in an increasingly fragmented industry.

I still marvel at the technical achievements of certain filmmakers. The awesome beauty of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, Christopher Nolan’s sweeping wide shots in Dunkirk, the impossibly long contiguous camera movements in Sam Mendes’s 1917. But these and other stunning technical achievements are effectively dwarfed at this moment by AI’s Infinite Camera capability. It is now possible to create a feature project with no physical rigs or any limitations of lens movement; continuous scenes without cuts; and formerly impossible shots.

Financial constraints melt away, too. Today’s hobbyist has access to infinite production value. Digitalized explosions, chases, and worlds at near-zero cost, action sequences unmoored by risk or logistics. With endless iteration, digital assets can now produce infinite edits on-demand. Don’t care for an ending? Produce an alternative to your taste. Personalize cuts for individual viewers with almost no margin cost.

Hollywood’s advantage was coordination of scarce talent and capital. AI erases both. 

The Death of the Movie Star

In the new environment, are we likely to see the end of the traditional movie star? Many have observed that we have been doing so gradually for years, and I am sympathetic to this point of view. But my suggestion is more drastic (and more sudden) than the general distaste for contemporary ideologues whose social media platforms lambast fan bases into supporting mindless octogenarians like Biden or thoughtless shills like Harris.

Likeness will become digital property. Already-famous actors are now likely to become licensable digital assets. Studios may simply lease faces instead of hiring performers in the very near future. And these faces need not even be living. Just last week, Disney launched a legal proceeding against Seedance 2.0, a Tik-Tok owned AI model that Disney says has stocked its intellectual property including images from its Marvel and Star Wars franchises.

Imagine a “Jimmy Stewart Goes to Trump’s Washington” or an “Audrey Hepburn Mean Girls 3.” Tom Cruise may be continuously “performing” stunt roles for the next hundred years through his licensed AI double.

With the digital raising of the dead, legendary performers will soon return to their former glory in a decidedly unguilded way. Cross-era casting has already debuted on social media, and will be the norm. Juxtaposed actors and plots will be recombined ad infinitum.

After having made so many predictions already, I hesitate to continue. But what if we have just arrived at the end of new faces? Consider that the typical production risk calculus favors known likenesses. Why pay expensive casting directors to discover new faces when audiences already trust familiar stars who can never age? 

We may even see Hollywood invent AI “people” whose AI agents cultivate entire online personages; digital assets will post, tweet, and opine in the same way obnoxious stars do, except that all the messaging will be the intellectual property of the studio who created the asset. These AI personalities will be algorithmically optimized for maximum audience engagement. And importantly, these characters will never age, never go on strike, never negotiate contracts, and never generate controversy on their own.

The animation studio who owns its characters outright in perpetuity was the unknowing precursor to the new Hollywood “star.”

Permanent Nostalgic Cultural Stasis: A Frozen Canon

We have, in truth, been living in a nostalgic loop for some time. The past decade has delivered an endless parade of remakes, reboots, origin stories, and cinematic universes that recycle familiar plots with new costumes and upgraded visual effects. Studios, driven by risk aversion, have relied on proven intellectual property rather than investing in new (unknown) narratives. The result has been a subtle cultural stagnation disguised as abundance.

Artificial intelligence may intensify this condition dramatically. If audiences can summon beloved actors, eras, and story worlds on demand, the gravitational pull of the past may become nearly irresistible. Why risk the unfamiliar when one can re-live the emotional certainties of the known? Nostalgia, once a sentiment, may be becoming the dominant cultural aesthetic.

This raises an unsettling possibility: will cultural change itself slow, or even halt, when the archive of the past is infinitely remixable? Don’t misunderstand – I am not arguing that our cultural direction is perfect, or even good. In most ways, we are moving away from God, away from the Church founded by Christ, against the family, morality, and being itself. Yet the thought of being trapped in an endless loop is equally horrifying.

A generation raised on ceaselessly recombined icons may experience culture less as a forward movement and more as a curated museum. Woodstock can be restaged nightly. Hendrix can tour again. The golden age never ends because it never has to. This is the realization of a hellish nightmare which is, in many ways, baby boomers’ dreams come.

Innovation will merely be recombination. Instead of new myths, we will see the perpetual rearrangement of old ones. The future risks resembling an endless cinematic archive of searchable, editable, and emotionally familiar content rather than a progression toward new forms of storytelling grounded in tradition.

So the most profound disruptions may not be economic but metaphysical. For over a century, film has captured human performance. We have seen embodied emotion, breath, fatigue, presence. If performances are generated rather than lived, we must ask whether something essential has been lost. A digital face can cry; an algorithm can simulate grief. But is emotion still authentic when no human heart has felt it?

Audiences may find themselves moved by simulations while knowing no actual person stood behind the performance. This tension between authenticity and simulation will shape the moral psychology of viewers. Traditional Catholics have a natural aversion to plastic surgery and bodily enhancements because of this tension; we live in the real, and we have a hard time squaring a plastic appearance with a truly beautiful form. While that is certainly not the only reason to reject unnatural augmentation, the feeling is the same. We risk learning to accept emotional experiences detached from human presence, a development with implications far beyond cinema.

Concrete moral questions should also be considered. Who may authorize the use of a deceased performer’s likeness? Does consent extend beyond death? If identity becomes licensable property, does the person become separable from his image? The law will lag far behind the technology.

Equally troubling is the erosion of trust. Deepfake technologies already blur the boundary between reality and fabrication. When any face can be made to say anything, the evidentiary value of visual media collapses. Many believe we have long been subjected to deep fakes. How many variations of Biden’s ears did we accept over the last decade?

A civilization built upon recorded truth may soon find itself adrift in a sea of convincing falsehoods. I pity those who will actively prefer the latter, like the character of Joe Pantoliano who strikes a deal with Agent Smith to be reinserted in the Matrix, proclaiming “ignorance is bliss!”

Unique Opening for Catholic Filmmakers

Yet within disruption lies opportunity.

The collapse of technical and financial barriers may open a door long closed to mission-driven storytelling. For decades, projects centered on saints, missionaries, and Church history have struggled to secure financing due to perceived commercial risk.

Those constraints are evaporating.

Historical epics once required massive budgets; now they can be rendered with modest resources. The lives of the martyrs, the evangelization of continents, the drama of councils and conversions – these stories are no longer financially prohibitive.

The same holds true for the great inheritance of Western literature.

Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, Chaucer’s pilgrimage of souls. These works contain narrative architecture that modern audiences still intuitively recognize. Catholics who master the three-act structure will not be antiquarians, but pioneers. The traditional 3-part rosary itself unfolds in mysteries that mirror classical dramatic form: incarnation, suffering, redemption. The grammar of storytelling has always been theological. 

Narratives ignored or distorted by mainstream studios can now reach audiences directly. Distribution is decentralized; gatekeepers will be obsolete. Beauty and truth need no longer be compromised by financiers or diluted by marketing departments. (I know these compromises because I have made them.)

The historical irony is that Catholics once exerted moral influence over Hollywood through institutions like the Legion of Decency. Though that era has long passed, AI may restore storytelling power to creators animated by a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Degenerate content will remain readily available; human appetites ensure it. Yet financial performance has long suggested a quieter truth. While PG-13 and R-rated films dominate production volume, they often deliver marginal returns. Family-friendly films, by contrast, reliably produce enduring profitability. For decades, studios have subsidized boundary-pushing content with the dependable revenue of wholesome entertainment.  

If the market truly speaks in an era of decentralized production, what proves most prolific may not be the lurid or transgressive, but the inspiring. Audiences still hunger for stories that elevate rather than degrade. The financial data proves this point better than I can.

The Counter-Culture

Human presence will not disappear without resistance. Many viewers will continue to crave embodied performance. The subtle unpredictability of a living actor, the unrepeatable energy of physical presence. Live-action filmmaking may become a premium art form, prized precisely because it is real. Just as vinyl records survived the streaming era as objects of tactile authenticity, human performance may acquire renewed cultural value. I bet most of you buy physical books, and always will. I do too.

We are also witnessing only the first generation of synthetic performance. Authentic charisma, the mysterious convergence of presence, timing, vulnerability, and grace, may prove more difficult to simulate than early demonstrations suggest. Audiences possess a keen instinct for the genuinely human.

Nor will physical creation vanish. Even in an AI-saturated environment, there will remain a need for artists who shape tangible reality: set designers, craftsmen, cinematographers, directors capable of orchestrating human action. Ironically, as Hollywood embraces automation, it may inadvertently hand the keys of embodied artistry to smaller communities of creators willing to preserve the human element. Perhaps that will be the Catholics.

This is precisely why I have chosen to join the Board of Directors of the newly-formed Catholic Film Institute. This new non-profit has already demonstrated success in fostering truly Catholic collaboration between filmmakers, large and small. 

Whether this moment marks the end of Hollywood or merely its next transformation remains to be seen. The industry may not disappear so much as evolve from a production ecosystem into a licensing, intellectual property, and asset-management enterprise.

If anyone can create anything, the scarcity that remains is not technical, but narrative. The decisive question will no longer be how a story is made, but why it is worth telling. Catholics have an impressive advantage in this new paradigm.

In such a landscape, audiences may rediscover an older standard: stories rooted in truth, animated by moral imagination, and ordered toward meaning rather than spectacle. The future of storytelling may depend less on innovation than on recovery: a return to forms and themes that have always spoken most deeply to the human heart.