The Deals Are Already Done
Hollywood didn't resist AI — it just negotiated quietly while everyone else was arguing on Twitter.
The deals were already done. Hollywood AI partnerships proliferated behind NDAs. The Lionsgate/Runway announcement was the one that went public; dozens didn't. Pattern recognition was the right tool here.
Lionsgate signed with Runway. That happened. It's in the news today and people are treating it like a warning shot — like this is the moment studios start considering the possibility of AI in their pipelines.
The moment was earlier. The moment was many moments ago, and most of them didn't get press releases.
This is how it works. A studio's legal team and some AI company's bizdev people get in a room, NDAs go down, someone gets a check, a model gets a library of content to train on — and none of it surfaces until one party decides the announcement is more valuable than the secrecy. Lionsgate decided that. Most haven't.
Sora almost certainly has a deal with Disney. I have no inside information here — this is just pattern recognition. OpenAI does not cold-call people. Disney does not experiment casually. The gap between "OpenAI builds a video model" and "Disney uses it to generate content" is a conference room in Burbank and some signatures, and there is no reason to believe that room hasn't already happened.
The public conversation about AI and Hollywood — the op-eds, the SAG negotiations, the think pieces about what this means for writers — is a conversation about a future that the people with actual power are treating as the present.
By the time anyone announces anything, the interesting part is already over.
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