Google is investing roughly $75 million in A24, arguably the most fashionable film studio of its generation. The investment will fund an AI research partnership aimed at developing tools for filmmaking. In other words, A24 has partnered with Google on AI. The announcement sent shock waves through the industry. And no wonder. Through sheer curatorial vision, A24 has propelled scores of independent filmmakers into the industry’s upper ranks and, through the cultural reach of both its films and its merchandise, established itself as a brand that resonates equally with contemporary hipsters and old-school cinephiles. Put simply, it is the company behind “The Lobster,” “The Florida Project,” “Hereditary,” “Minari,” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

Criticism quickly flooded online communities and A24’s official social media accounts. Members of AAA24, the paid membership program, responded by posting screenshots of their canceled subscriptions across social media. The backlash intensified because the announcement came only shortly after Kane Parsons—the director of “Backrooms,” A24’s biggest box-office success to date—had denounced AI as a form of creative rot. A24 later clarified that the agreement was a research partnership rather than a production deal, imposed no obligation to produce films or pursue specific AI projects, and would not involve training AI models on the studio’s intellectual property.

The film industry has been fighting AI on several fronts. The most widely remembered came in the spring of 2023, when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors and broadcast performers, went on strike. By the end of that year, both unions had secured contractual protections against AI from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, bringing the strike to a close. Once the labor dispute ended, however, the industry gradually began opening its doors to AI. But the wider that door opened, the fiercer the backlash became. When Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist”—which received 13 and 10 Academy Award nominations, respectively—revealed that they had used AI in a limited capacity to refine their actors’ accents, both films faced a backlash during awards season.

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” also drew criticism after using AI-generated imagery—created from scenes that never appear in the film—for its promotional posters. (Incidentally, “Civil War” was another A24 release.) The filmmakers behind each project maintained that, while AI had played a supporting role, every artistic decision ultimately originated with—and was completed by—human creators. The controversy, however, refused to die down. At its core was a simple conviction: there was no reason to surrender the human role to AI. Better to leave to people what only people can do, even when AI could accomplish the task more easily. That, at least, was the prevailing sentiment through 2025.

Then, in 2026, the tide began to turn. Netflix acquired InterPositive, the AI filmmaking startup co-founded by Ben Affleck, in a deal worth roughly $587 million. In a public statement, Netflix stressed that the acquisition was intended to support practical post-production workflows and was built around technology trained on a film’s original footage—not on text prompts used to generate arbitrary images. Then came the news that Martin Scorsese had joined AI company Black Forest Labs (BFL) as an advisor. Scorsese argued that cinema, barely 125 years old, remains a young medium and that filmmakers should stay open to the ways it might evolve. AI, he said, could help creative teams communicate ideas more clearly and efficiently, ultimately enabling them to make more sophisticated films. The backlash was swift. Organizations including the Art Directors Guild (ADG) accused Scorsese of turning his back on the human artists who had helped build his career. Yet by then, James Cameron had already joined the board of Stability AI, the company behind a leading text-to-image model, while Peter Jackson had publicly argued that AI was fundamentally no different from computer-generated imagery and could be embraced as another filmmaking tool.

Can artificial intelligence and cinema ultimately coexist? Will the day come when the film industry embraces AI as a creative partner, much as audiences have already accepted it as part of everyday life? I have been asking those questions since 2023. By 2026, I find myself answering them differently. The industry’s response is telling. Faced with public disappointment, A24 has repeatedly insisted that humans will remain at the negotiating table. Rather than passively accepting whatever technology has to offer, the studio argues that creators must help shape the rules that govern it and develop creator-first tools from within. It has also pledged to safeguard the library it has built with generations of filmmakers. The message is clear: AI may assist the creative process, but humans must remain the ones who authorize its use—and, when necessary, serve as its final safeguard.

In other words, studios no longer see AI as an external threat to be kept at bay. They increasingly regard it as a strategic asset—one to be controlled, integrated, and brought in-house. They are investing heavily to weave AI into their own production pipelines while restricting its training to proprietary assets, whether A24’s distinctive library or Netflix’s tightly controlled footage from individual productions. Exclusive datasets are themselves becoming a form of leverage. If, as in Martin Scorsese’s case, AI is used during pre-production to communicate a director’s ideas for shots and framing more intuitively, then Ben Affleck may be right to imagine a future in which lower production costs allow virtually anyone to make a film like “Good Will Hunting.”

In fact, many producers and directors in the Korean film industry have been exploring collaborations with AI companies for years. Some are eager to harness a technology evolving at breakneck speed; others, faced with a film investment market that has struggled to recover since the COVID-19 pandemic, see AI as a way to produce more with fewer resources. Film festivals now routinely host AI forums for industry professionals, while Hong Kong’s FILMART—the largest content market in Asia—launched its inaugural AI Academy this year, a workshop series comprising eighteen sessions on the practical use of AI in filmmaking. This shift will inevitably reshape every stage of the filmmaking value chain. The question, then, is no longer whether humans will remain in the loop, but where the boundaries should be drawn—and how much flexibility they should allow. As AI continues to learn from data, how will those developing and training these systems address growing job insecurity and widening inequalities across the production workforce? And if data-driven development and algorithmic decision-making become increasingly sophisticated, how much of the independent-minded creativity that once defined studios like A24 and early Netflix will survive the investment process? By 2026, the way studios engage with AI is no longer defined simply by resistance. It has entered a new phase.