Hollywood's Two Eggs And The Future of Cinema

For as long as I can remember, critics have been pleading with movie studios to forgo flashy CGI and focus on strong narrative. They’ve never listened, and I don’t blame them. I’ll admit it, I like a little bit of slop. And I think you do as well.

Oh, get off your high horse! You didn’t enjoy the grandiose, nonsensical film that is Transformers: Age of Extinction? Millions of other people did. Or take the scantily clad, one-dimensional Harley Quinn in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. One critic may have called it “disrespectful to the viewer,” but hey, DC Comics made a boatload of cash from themillions of theatergoers who handed over their hard-earned money.

Even if these movies aren’t your cup of tea, everyone has their guilty pleasures that they admit are low quality. Putting AI aside, this is the very definition of ‘slop’: cheap, low-quality digital content. Everyone likes some flavor of it.

Yet Hollywood has found it harder to peddle more of the same high-budget, low-on-character-development movies onto theatergoers.
Supergirl looks like a box office flop. No one seems to watch the latest Marvel hits anymore (although some of us make an exception for Tom Holland). There have always been shiny, gauche blockbusters that fail to perform at the box office; before, though, they always arrived alongside others that were succeeding. Why aren’t audiences reacting to Snow White in 2025 the same way they reacted to Maleficent in 2015?

Probably because slop is ubiquitous now. It’s on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok. Your friends can send it to you, your mom posts about it, you can generate it yourself on a variety of exotic sounding applications. The market is saturated.

There has always been a market for superficial, scintillating experiences. Artificial intelligence has not changed that. It has, however, made it incredibly inexpensive to obtain and create flashy visual content. Those who got their dystopian-mutant-human fix from Resident Evil: Extinction can now get the same surface-level thrill from an AI-generated YouTube video like 2095. The moviegoers who needed Alvin and the Chipmunks to watch CGI rodents can get the same dopamine hit from a TikTok of AI-generated bunnies bouncing on a trampoline.

Still, you might retort that there’s a big difference between an AI-generated video of Trump masquerading as Supermanand watching a feature-length film of Superman overcoming his archenemies. Sure, I agree. The gap just isn’t twenty dollars wide, nor is it worth leaving the comfort of my home and trekking over to a movie theater where I will probably find gum under my seat and be tempted to buy overpriced popcorn.

So, what’s a filmmaker to do?

The successful films of the current season point strongly towards intricate, character-driven films. Novice director Curry Barker created the smash-hit Obsession on a tiny budget by focusing on a core set of human emotions and characters and forgoing expensive theatrics. Even Project Hail Mary, with its healthy $200 million budget, is really just about a single relationship.

No surprise—the fantastical is an everyday sight now; I can conjure a dragon on my phone in the checkout line. What we miss, and what audiences will still pay big bucks for, is feeling something: the gut-punch of Anora, the coming-of-age ache of Inside Out 2.

Spectacle and story have always been cinema’s two engines. Tom Gunning, the film historian, notes that the earliest films were pure spectacle—little more than a train pulling into a station—while later scholars such as Geoff King showed that commercial cinema works by blending spectacle with narrative. I understand why studios lean on the spectacle half. While pizzazz is by no means cheap, it is consistently manufacturable. Quality narrative is much rarer, and no one’s figured out how to produce it reliably.

But the mass-production of slop means that pizzazz simply doesn’t have the same bang-for-your-buck to drive viewership anymore. Explosions and gunfights aren’t bringing anyone into the door. If I can see Pikachu skateboarding on my phone, I’m going to need a pretty compelling reason to see the new Pokemon movie.

What a century of critics couldn’t do might just be accomplished by the current technological breakthrough. Generative AI has irreversibly changed what consumers demand and flipped the economic calculus. Ironically, the same models that spam our feeds might be stimulating the production of more stories like Backrooms, Obsession, and Project Hail Mary.

Studios may take time to adapt, but the old playbook isn’t working because there is no demand for it anymore. Hollywood cannot out-slop the slop machine; the studios that survive will be the ones that embrace narrative over spectacle—not because some elitist film critic said so, but because narrative is their only competitive advantage.

If “heartbreak” doesn’t actually “feel good in a place like this”, what’s the point?