What the movies really need from Sydney Sweeney

In one scenario for the pop cultural future, soon we'll have movies without movie stars.

- Ross Douthat

In this scenario, generative artificial intelligence will produce infinite movie-like stories on the cheap, bespoke, and tailored to micro-audiences, featuring “actors” created exclusively for the purpose. Maybe some of these creations will be digitally pilfered from the library of departed greats — want to see Humphrey Bogart in a Star Wars movie? Here you go! But mostly people will accept that the characters in any given Al-generated movie exist only for that story, not as Robert Redford or Diane Keaton once existed as recurring faces in a moviegoing life.

Now here's an alternative vision of the future: We might have stars without the movies. That is, under AI conditions, the equilibrium of popular culture might shift permanently away from long-form storytelling and toward the endless short-form scroll, leaving the traditional two-hour motion picture as one minor archaic option in the infinitely generative world of addictive personalised slop. But in that world, there might still be a deep human demand for identification with real-world people, beautiful charismatic figures who actually exist outside your screen — and so stardom would continue to bubble up from whatever remained of the pre-AI entertainment ecosystem, even if hit movies in the old style were gone for good.