Parmy Olson, Columnist

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt Can Relax. AI Won't Kill Movies

March 20, 2026 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise can rest easy. AI won’t destroy the movie business.
Photographer: Joe Maher/Getty Images Europe

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Justin Hackney is used to being ostracized. The movie producer, who played “the infected kid” in director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, shadowed Boyle for years and then pivoted into tech halfway through his career, taking roles with OpenAI and ElevenLabs to evangelize the benefits of generative artificial intelligence tools in filmmaking and advertising. Friends from the industry stopped talking to him; one ad agency executive had his head in his hands as he listened to one of Hackney’s presentations. “A lot of people hated me, and I don’t blame them to be honest,” Hackney tells me.

The film and television industries have vigorously resisted AI out of concern it’ll replace scriptwriters, storyboard artists, visual effects experts and more. Highly realistic AI videos like the one of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a bare-knuckle fight, courtesy of Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0, have fanned the flames of worry. On Sunday, Conan O’Brien kicked off his monologue for the 2026 Oscars by saying he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards.”