Al v Hollywood: One battle after another to save the human performance

Sora and synthetic stars show how fast Al is surging into cinema — threatening human actors and the soul that goes into their craft.

- Bhavan Jaipragas Deputy Opinion Editor

Such is the swift march of artificial intelligence (AI) into film-making that one cannot help but wonder, after watching Leonardo DiCaprio in the political satire One Battle After Another, how many more of these virtuosic performances by flesh-and-blood actors we will see in future.

The Hollywood superstar, playing a swaggering former revolutionary turned bathrobe-clad degenerate with remnants of decency (and fierce love for his daughter), delivers the kind of electric, zany performance that has cemented him as the industry’s pinnacle — its ultimate prestige actor.

But will studios still need him in two years — five at most - when he or his brilliant costars, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro or the deliciously evil Sean Penn, could easily be replaced by Al-generated replicas cobbled from their existing performances?

Now, it seems laughable to argue that ordinary folks, readers of this newspaper dealing with serious everyday issues, should sympathise with Hollywood’s AI disruption — or with DiCaprio, paid US$25 million (S$32.4 million) for this project, widely hailed as 2025's best film. But the moment demands it.

For filmgoers - ardent DiCaprio fans like this columnist - who value what great acting and cinema as an art form evoke in us, we must grasp what Al's disruption means for Hollywood.

As actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt observed in 2024, the US film industry may well be the canary in the coal mine for all white-collar industries facing AI disruption.

He has a point: This is the industry whose power - channelled through a New York Times column by its elder statesman George Clooney — put in motion a sitting United States president’s eleventh-hour decision not to seek reelection. If even that cultural and political heft cannot hold off Al's advance, what industry can?