Two Visions, One Industry: Inside Hollywood’s 2026 Reckoning With AI

In the span of a single week in June 2026, two announcements from opposite ends of the entertainment world captured exactly how unresolved the cinema industry’s relationship with AI remains. 

On June 22, Google DeepMind revealed a $75 million investment in A24, the indie studio behind Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once, billed as a “first-of-its-kind” research partnership. 

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis framed it as collaboration rather than imposition, arguing that the way to build tools that “empower artists is to work directly with them.” A24, for its part, insisted the deal was defensive in spirit: communications representative Sophia Shin later explained the studio wanted “a seat at the table” so creators could shape AI tools rather than have them imposed from outside, and partner Scott Belsky stressed that what emerges won’t resemble prompt-driven generative slop. 

Notably, the deal grants no access to A24’s content library or audience data — it is a workflow partnership, not a content-licensing arrangement, and the first tool reportedly in development is an AI storyboard generator rather than a text-to-video system.

The very next day, an almost diametrically opposed gesture unfolded at the European Parliament in Brussels. Cate Blanchett, flanked by MEP Eva Maydell and filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, launched the RSL Media Human Consent Registry — a free, public tool allowing anyone to declare whether AI systems may use their name, image, voice, likeness or movement, and under what terms. 

Blanchett, who co-founded RSL Media in May with Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther, described the initiative as a response to AI’s “rampant, essentially unchecked” expansion, and framed identity itself as intellectual property deserving explicit consent architecture. 

The registry builds on the open “Really Simple Licensing” protocol, with backing from a substantial roster of actors and creatives including Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Viola Davis and Javier Bardem. Crucially, the tool is voluntary: it carries no legal enforcement mechanism, and its real-world impact depends entirely on whether AI developers choose to consult it.

Read together, these two moments are less a coincidence than a snapshot of an industry attempting two contradictory survival strategies simultaneously — one built on proximity and influence, the other on refusal and rights infrastructure.

A Fractured Industry, Camp by Camp

The DeepMind–A24 deal and the Blanchett registry sit atop a much wider and increasingly fractious landscape. Organized labor has settled into a posture of guarded acceptance: SAG-AFTRA’s 2026 agreement with the studios permits synthetic performers only when they add “significant additional value” to a project, and requires advance notice before any actor’s performance is licensed for AI training. 

Union leadership has called this a win, while internal critics, including former technology committee co-chair Erik Passoja, argue the standard is vague enough for studio lawyers to define however they wish, with no compensation floor attached.

Beyond labor, distinct camps have emerged. A pragmatist wing, exemplified by filmmaker Paul Trillo, treats AI as a tool that absorbs tedious production work while keeping human creative judgment central. 

A more provocative techno-optimism surfaced when screenwriter Paul Schrader predicted that fully AI-generated protagonists would soon command box office success — a claim met with notable skepticism even among AI-friendly industry audiences. 

Opposing this is an organized resistance movement: Everything Everywhere All at Once director Daniel Kwan has built an industry-wide Creators Coalition on AI, insisting filmmakers, not technologists, should set the terms of adoption, while Justine Bateman’s “No AI” certification initiative, Credo23, has assembled figures like Sean Baker and Gus Van Sant in explicit opposition. Tellingly, even A24’s own celebrated director, Kane Parsons, has publicly rejected the very technology his studio just invested in.

The catalytic event behind much of this year’s urgency was the February viral spread of AI-generated videos depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in fabricated confrontations, generated via ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. 

Disney issued a cease-and-desist over likely unauthorized use of copyrighted material, and SAG-AFTRA condemned the clips as disregarding “law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent” — language that has since become the connective tissue between nearly every subsequent AI initiative in Hollywood, the Blanchett registry included. 

The fight is also legislative: a Department of Justice task force has challenged state-level performer-protection laws as federally preemptable, even as advocates push the No Fakes Act through Congress and capital continues pouring into AI studios at an extraordinary rate.

Polarization as the New Normal

What emerges from this landscape is not a coherent industry position but a deep structural contradiction. 

Studios publicly champion artist-centered AI development while quietly building tools whose long-term implications for labor displacement remain unresolved. Creators denounce unregulated AI use while some of their own institutions sign equity-bearing partnerships with the very companies developing that technology. 

Consent registries promise individual agency but carry no enforcement teeth, while collective bargaining agreements offer enforcement mechanisms riddled with interpretive loopholes. 

Hollywood, in other words, is not choosing between embracing and resisting AI — it is doing both at once, often within the same studio, the same union and even the same film. 

That contradiction, rather than any single deal or declaration, may be the truest portrait of the industry’s current moment.

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