The same conversation keeps coming up at every market, every festival, every industry roundtable, almost always in a defeated tone: our content just isn’t landing anymore. Theaters are emptying out, platforms want something else. The usual suspects are already lined up: short-form video that trained audiences to expect less, budgets that never stretch far enough, and now AI, threatening to make everything faster and cheaper. Three convenient scapegoats — none of which force us to look in the mirror.

For a long time, what separated one creative from another was execution. Knowing how to shoot with technical polish, how to edit with precision, how to write with real craft — those were rare skills, and rarity was the filter that decided who got to produce content and who didn’t. AI broke that filter. Today, anyone with the right tools can generate a polished image, draft a competent script, or edit a video to a technical standard that used to take years to reach.