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By Peter Zerzan
Filmmaker and founder of Kuamito Productions
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Every few years, someone confidently asserts that cinema is dead. First, it was television. Then home video. Then streaming. Most recently, it has been generative AI. We were promised a dystopian future where anyone could become a filmmaker with a prompt, where algorithms would replace talented directors and cinematographers, and where traditional filmmaking would become an expensive relic.
I bet against it, and this year’s biggest films have only reinforced my why.
Audiences, evidently, aren’t interested in paying for convenience. They pay for conviction.
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Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit U.S. theaters on July 31, and trade trackers pegged it for one of the biggest openings in Hollywood history. What almost nobody is talking about is why. Tom Holland has been candid in recent press about the film’s production, crediting his time on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with changing how he thinks about the job.
He reportedly developed a much stronger appreciation for locking down the story before cameras rolled. He was willing to delay production to make sure scenes actually worked rather than assuming they could be repaired later in post-production. Nolan hauled massive 70 mm IMAX cameras into unforgiving locations because he believed the audience would notice the difference. Many executives would call that inefficient. I call it respect. Respect for the story, for the audience, for the idea that movies should feel earned.
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The discipline shows. The Odyssey opened July 17 and has already pulled in over $642 million globally, which, now more than ever, reflects the significance of embracing ambitious filmmaking instead of chasing digital convenience.
This year’s box office has become a referendum on how films are made.
After years of pandemic disruption, writers’ strikes, and uncertainty, theatrical exhibition is finally recovering. Predictably, familiar franchises have performed well. Sequels and established intellectual property continue to dominate headlines because studios understandably like predictable investments. Yet some of the biggest theatrical success stories of 2025 didn’t come from legacy studios. They came from two directors in their 20s who started making internet videos.
Curry Barker’s Obsession, made for under half a million dollars, has grossed over $400 million. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, made for about $10 million, has grossed $390 million. Neither arrived carrying decades of brand recognition nor depended on nostalgia to fill seats. These projects proved that fresh voices still have enormous commercial value. Their success should be a wake-up call to an industry that confuses familiarity with creativity.
More importantly, neither of them used AI to get there either.
Parsons has called generative AI a symptom of "cultural and economic rot." The people who understand filmmaking best also understand what AI cannot replicate. Nolan himself has pointed to Barker and Parsons as proof that a generation raised online still wants real craft when given the choice, and the audience attests to that.
Technology has always changed filmmaking. Digital cameras replaced film for many productions, and editing software revolutionized post-production. Still, none of those developments threatened cinema because they remained tools serving human creativity.
Generative AI is being marketed very differently, where its message goes beyond collaboration and bleeds into replacement. Replacement of writers, storyboard artists, actors, composers, editors, and anyone who makes difficult creative decisions with software that predicts what the next image should look like.
That is not innovation, but automation disguised as imagination.
We were told that AI would become the dominant form of visual storytelling. Families, apparently, would gather around the television to watch whatever bizarre prompt happened to be fashionable. Perhaps one day that world will exist.
Today is not that day.
Instead, audiences are buying tickets to films that demanded extraordinary effort to make. They are paying premiums to watch movies photographed on giant-format cameras. They are discussing performances, practical effects, and directorial choices rather than marveling at how efficiently a computer assembled images.
The financial aspect of AI has also become noticeably more complicated than its early evangelists predicted. Investors are asking tougher questions about profitability and long-term sustainability. Running massive AI models requires staggering computing resources and enormous energy consumption. The idea that AI represents the cheaper future of entertainment is beginning to look less certain than many assumed.
Hollywood, meanwhile, continues doing what Hollywood has always done.
It gambles.
William Goldman famously wrote that “nobody knows anything,” and decades later, that remains one of the smartest observations ever made about the entertainment business. Nobody predicted which independent films would become cultural phenomena. Nobody accurately forecasts every blockbuster or a formula guaranteeing an emotional connection.
That uncertainty is precisely Hollywood’s greatest strength. If success could be calculated, every studio would produce masterpieces every weekend. They don’t because art refuses to behave like mathematics.
As someone who has filmed on location, from the streets of San Francisco late at night to busy highways in India, I understand just how difficult filmmaking really is. Every production becomes an exercise in problem-solving, from weather changes to tight budgets. There is nothing glamorous about solving those problems in real time.
Yet that struggle produces something irreplaceable. When you plan a production properly before you ever call “action,” you save money precisely because you already know what will and won’t work on screen. You discover it by being there, with a crew that’s committed and actors who are fully in it.
Consumers have always been remarkably good at recognizing authenticity, even when they cannot explain why something feels authentic. We notice when actors are genuinely interacting with physical environments or when dialogue reflects lived experience rather than statistical probability.
That is why I remain optimistic about cinema’s future. Not because AI will disappear. It won’t. I am optimistic because audiences continue rewarding filmmakers who care enough to make something worth watching. They recognize effort. They appreciate originality. They can tell when someone has taken the difficult road instead of the convenient one. And judging by what audiences are rewarding this year, they have no intention of forgetting that.
Peter Zerzan is an award-winning independent filmmaker and the founder of Kuamito Productions. Transitioning from a background in political organizing, Zerzan channels his strategic vision into cinematic storytelling. He wrote and directed the acclaimed short films Election Night and The Extraction*. His latest project,* The Tourist*, debuted at the San Francisco Short Film Festival. Zerzan is currently developing his first feature film while advocating for creative risk-taking and human connection in cinema.*
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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