I was 8 years old when I saw Star Wars in the theaters in the summer of 1977. When that Star Destroyer crawled across the screen in the opening scene, I had never seen anything like it. Nobody had. At the packed movie theater, our collective jaws dropped. For two hours, I lived in a galaxy far, far away, because George Lucas showed me something I could only imagine before that moment.
That feeling had a name, though I didn’t know it then: awe.
A year later, Superman took flight, and we really did believe a man could fly. Then came Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, and Terminator 2. In 1993, Steven Spielberg and the brilliant Steve “Spaz” Williams at Industrial Light & Magic gave us Jurassic Park and the most realistic dinosaurs we’d ever seen. Williams’ groundbreaking work changed the course of cinema forever. The Matrix gave us “bullet time.” Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy created an entire world. The Marvel movies made us marvel.
What made them magical was simple: We had never seen anything like them before.
With the progress we’ve evolved to make, we’ve inadvertently ruined the magic.
The Bottlenecks That Made Magic
For most of cinema’s history, there was a bottleneck between imagination and depiction. We could dream up fantastic things, but we couldn’t show them visually. That constraint was the secret ingredient of movie magic. The bottleneck created scarcity. And scarcity is what makes something precious, not abundance. If everyone drove a Lamborghini, it would be merely a car.
CGI cracked open the first bottleneck. Suddenly, we could depict the impossible. But a second bottleneck held: cost. Only studios spending hundreds of millions could deliver the highest-quality visuals. A third bottleneck held too: access. We had to go to theaters to experience these spectacles, which made them communal events, shared cultural moments.
Netflix has a wonderful series, The Movies That Made Us. I love it because it speaks to my experience and that of so many others. The movies made us because these shared cultural experiences connected us to the depths of ourselves and to the depths within others. Teens 30 years from now will not have “The Memes That Made Us” because who we are and what connects us cannot be found in the divided shallows.
Streaming dissolved the access bottleneck. We could watch blockbuster visuals from our couches. Then, we reduced awe to six inches on our iPhones. Our minds couldn’t be blown when we could see everything, everywhere, all at once.
But one final bottleneck remained: Someone still had to actually make it professionally.
That last bottleneck just fell.
When Anyone Can Create the Next Avengers
Last month, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generation tool so powerful that Hollywood is in a panic. Disney and Paramount have sent cease-and-desist letters. SAG-AFTRA has condemned it. Deadpool co-writer Rhett Reese said, “In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases.”
My feed on X is flooded with AI-generated mashups: Predator versus Terminator, Homelander versus Superman, Bruce Lee versus Godzilla. They all look like $200 million studio productions. They were made on laptops.
The bottleneck is gone. Anyone can now create what only billion-dollar studios could produce a few years ago. And when everyone can make movie magic, the magic is gone.
The entire movie and television industry is now upended. Fellow Longhorn Matthew McConaughey sat down with Timothée Chalamet at a CNN and Variety town hall at UT Austin recently and told a room full of students about AI: “It’s coming. It’s already here. Don’t deny it.”
A recent article by Matt Shumer, Something Big Is Happening, went viral for a reason. It’s not just happening in Hollywood: Every sector of our civilization is being radically transformed at an exponential rate—medicine, science, coding, education, entertainment, law, politics…everything.
The Popcorn Problem
Here’s another way to think of what is happening. Something pairs with movies like nothing else: popcorn. A great movie paired with popcorn is an enhanced experience. They go together perfectly.
But what happens when we eat too much popcorn? We’ve all been there. Halfway through the bucket, we feel bloated, greasy, and a little sick. The thing that enhanced the experience in small doses ruined it in excess. That’s not an argument against popcorn. It’s an argument against too much popcorn.
That’s the problem with our screens. It’s not that we’re on them at all. It’s that we’re on them too much. We have more YouTube videos than we could watch in a thousand lifetimes. Once we’re consuming the highest quality we can biologically tolerate, more will not make us happier. Our brains have moment-to-moment ceilings for pleasure and stimulation. For millions of years, the natural world kept us within these thresholds. Now we max out before lunch.
What is happening to our waistlines is happening to our psyches.
When Archetypes Are Boring
It’s not just the visuals. The archetypes are exhausted too. We’ve seen the hero’s journey so many times we could write it in our sleep: Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Neo, Spider-Man, and Katniss Everdeen.
Marvel villains are already destroying the multiverse. How much bigger can the threat get? We’ve watched buildings blow up, worlds end, and universes collapse. We’ve hit the ceiling, and there is no going past it.
We’ve seen the “hero of a thousand faces” a million times. The unlikely duos are now predictable. Just as it’s nearly impossible to create a new type of music that doesn’t sound like something we’ve already heard, storytelling has hit the same wall. With millions of people now generating content, all the basic combinations that would resonate have already been done.
In October 2025, an AI-generated country act called Breaking Rust topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. The number one country song in America was produced entirely by artificial intelligence. The future isn’t coming. It’s here.
Why We Can’t See What’s Happening
Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson nailed it: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” We are cavemen piloting a spaceship. And physicist Albert Bartlett named our fatal flaw: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
We suffer from evolutionary blindness. We didn’t evolve to perceive exponential change because nothing in our ancestral environment ever changed this fast. We’ve forgotten that who we are is who we were.
The Real Loss
What we’re really losing is not just movie magic. We’re losing the experience of awe itself. When I watched that Star Destroyer crawl overhead in 1977, my 8-year-old mind stretched to accommodate something entirely new. That experience is vanishing in a world where everything is instantly accessible and infinitely replicable.
My favorite line from my favorite movie keeps echoing in my mind. In Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty uses his dying breath not to rage against humans, but to mourn the beauty he’d witnessed:
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
A machine, mourning lost wonder. If that doesn’t describe where we are, nothing does.
The Hollywood we know and love is history. We can’t stop that. But we can transform what comes next. Because the real magic was never the technology. It was the shared experiences of awe.
When everyone saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, it connected us. That was something deeper than entertainment. Friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and a brilliant team brought us movie magic. It was an interconnected experience of awe. As we fragment into millions of personalized content bubbles, each generating our own private spectacles, we lose the connective tissue that holds us together.
Steven Spielberg told an audience at SXSW in Austin this week: “I am not for AI that replaces a creative individual.” He’s right. We cannot allow our creative souls or our shared experiences to be destroyed by AI.
The magic was never in the technology. It was in seeing something we had never seen before, together. We can’t stop what’s coming. But we can fight to keep what matters most: the stories that connect us and the awe we feel side by side. The question isn’t how we save Hollywood. It’s how we save each other.
