GoKawiilPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Hollywood is cooked — or so a growing number of people on social media would like you to believe. Their purported proof: AI-generated clips of Daniel Craig riding a Vespa through an Italian city, Godzilla fighting King Kong, or The Avengers zooming through Manhattan.
In reality, cheap slop like this won’t replace Hollywood blockbusters any time soon. However, a new generation of AI video solutions could upend how studios work. That’s because, until recently, AI companies basically tried to sell Hollywood on the same idea as those Twitter guys, with a slightly more palpable spin. The pitch, in a nutshell: AI video will allow everyone to make movies faster, cheaper, better — one prompt at a time.
“The premise was: Substitute your camera for our video model,” says Luma AI CEO Amit Jain, whose company used to make that very same pitch to studios. But when it began partnering with the entertainment industry, it received a crash course in the way Hollywood actually works.
“It’s not sufficient to just produce a clip,” Jain says now. “Because then what?” Clips generated by video models are typically 10 to 16 seconds. “That’s not a shot. That’s not a sequence. That’s not a scene,” Jain says. “Churning out short videos is not enough.”
Now, AI companies like Luma believe they have found a better way to sell Hollywood on AI. The gist? Don’t just use AI for video — use it for everything.
Luma has been working on AI agents that can help with the entire production process. Jain compares this transition to the way software development with AI has evolved, with companies like Anthropic moving from simple vibe coding to agentic workflows.
“It’s not sufficient to just generate a little bit of code,” Jain says. “We need these systems to do long-horizon, end-to-end work. That’s what solves problems for people.” AI agents can do the same for Hollywood, he believes.
Luma isn’t alone with that approach. Just this week, Google unveiled a new version of its AI media authoring platform Flow that also emphasizes agentic end-to-end work over simple clip generation. “There’s this huge evolution that’s happening in generative tools,” says Google Labs VP Elias Roman. “Moving forward, they’re going to become much more like agents.”
... continue reading