'They'll continue to pay': The AI job apocalypse is headed to Hollywood, as studios begin replacing human roles with AI. What it means for movie goers

Recently, Gomez attended a conversation with Oscar-nominated writers Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson.

“During the discussion, they shared that, even in the pitching stage of a film or television project, they have used AI to generate proof-of-concept materials, with the permission of actors whose likenesses were used,” Gomez told Moneywise.

During the event, an actress in the audience asked why they wouldn’t simply hire actors, storyboard artists, and a small crew to create these proof-of-concept pieces.

“Their response was straightforward: Doing so would require paying an entire team before a project is financed,” Gomez noted. “By using AI, they can create pitch materials faster and at a fraction of the cost, increasing their chances of securing funding to eventually hire those artists and crew members for the actual production.”

Gomez said she “can understand” that perspective and see why someone might choose to invest limited resources into the project itself rather than into a proof of concept.

“At the same time, it saddens me to see creative roles, such as storyboard artists, already being displaced,” she added. “I believe we are only beginning to see the impact AI will have on creative employment across the industry.”

AI is taking out Hollywood jobs

The pain is real in Hollywood, with the industry shedding jobs at an alarming pace.

In the past 90 days, entertainment perennials like Bad Robot, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Disney have significantly cut staff.

One entertainment industry sector is especially fueling Hollywood layoffs. Short-form mobile series, which rely heavily on AI-powered production, have grown to a $1.3 billion industry. Short-form production companies like WndrCo, funded by entertainment industry titan Jeffrey Katzenberg, can generate 30-minute shows for up to $3,000 using AI technology. Before AI, shows of that caliber using human actors would cost up to $300,000 apiece.

It’s not only actors losing work, as the AI takeover could eliminate over 200,000 jobs by the end of 2026.

“The $300,000-to-$3,000 math is real at the advertising and branded-content level, too,” Lucas Vandenberg, actor and founder of Fifty & Five, an Orlando-based social media agency that builds AI-generated video for over 220 brands, told Moneywise. “We produce AI video spots for clients that previously required a shoot, talent, and an edit team. That work is already gone, not ‘going.’”

Vandenberg said that on the creative talent side, what’s disappearing first isn’t acting; it’s the volume work actors used to survive on between real roles, like user-generated content UGC reads, background, and scale content.

“Hollywood has a moat in human attachment to performers, but advertising has no such moat,” he said.

It’s all about cost

AI has given entertainment companies a convenient but critical reason to slash payrolls. In short, money speaks the real love language of Hollywood — profits.

“The first time most studios actually feel the gap, it is not in the headline talent budget. It’s in everything around them,” Malik Lindharth, CEO and founder at AutoCore AI, a consultancy that helps small and mid-sized businesses deploy AI across their operations, told WiseMoney.

With AI, a single background crowd that used to cost six figures in casting, transport, wardrobe, and per diem becomes a render that costs the price of GPU time.

“Studios are reporting savings of up to 90% per project on synthetic-actor productions, which sounds dramatic until you look at where the savings come from,” Lindharth said. “They’re coming from the work nobody puts on a poster: background performers, reshoots for minor changes, localized versions for 12 markets at once, the brand spokesperson who used to need three days of studio time and now needs a prompt.”

Lindharth said that Netflix has already used generative AI directly in production on El Eternauta, accelerating effects work that would have taken weeks.

“That is the pattern,” he noted. “The economics work because the marginal cost of a synthetic performer is close to zero, and high-volume, low-visibility roles are where marginal cost dominates the budget.”

But Paul Menes — a Los Angeles-based entertainment and digital media transactional lawyer who represents Hollywood creators, including Grammy and Oscar winners — told Moneywise that consumers aren’t getting any of the financial benefits from increasing AI use and entertainment content.

“They’ll continue to pay what it costs for what they want to see,” he noted. “The studios, platforms, investors, and where applicable their shareholders, will reap those financial benefits.”

Lindharth agrees, noting that every prior wave of operating-cost compression in streaming, from CDN improvements to encoding gains to original-content efficiencies, flowed to margins and content volume, not to subscriber price.

“Netflix raised prices five times in the last decade while its production costs per hour fell on a quality-adjusted basis,” he said. “The same logic played out across every other industry where AI cut operating costs.”