Hollywood hasn't lost its ability to tell great stories, yet it's losing the war for attention to platforms that reward engagement and iteration. TikTok users now spend 95 minutes a day on the app. Roblox reports nearly 98 million daily users, each spending over two hours inside its worlds. Twitch streams generate more monthly viewing than all broadcast scripted programming combined.
For a century, Hollywood operated on scarcity. There were limited screens, finite channels, and a well-grooved pipeline for finding, funding, and distributing content. Today's media economy is governed by abundance. Platforms operate as responsive ecosystems, delivering infinite content tailored by real-time feedback to the tastes of the user. Author, investor and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball suggests in his book The Metaverse, Building The Spatial Internet that creative work is no longer fixed from launch but instead tuned by user feedback.
Social media advertising revenue surpassed tv and cable television in time spent in 2022. For Gen Z that happened in 2020. The creator economy makes this shift visible. There are no gatekeepers. The algorithm shows your content to others if others like your content. According to Forbes, the top 50 social media creators earned more than $700 million in 2024.
Synthetic content now appears in two distinct forms. The first is human-driven: creators use AI tools to accelerate production or enhance quality and lower costs. Studios like Holywater and Fable are already producing shows this way. "We start with the audience, then generate and evolve the content with them," said Holywater founder Bogdan Nesvit. "The next stage of content will be generated by AI, not just recommended by it." Said Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat in an interview. "TikTok's AI algorithms will create content, instead of curating it."
Nowhere is this transformation clearer than in persistent game worlds we used to call The Metaverse. Roblox. (380 million monthly users), Fortnite (250 million), and Minecraft (226 million) are social spaces that feature games and entertainment made by other users. Roblox revenue exceeded $3.60 billion in 2024, marking a 28.7% increase from the previous year. CEO David Baszucki envisions Roblox as the central hub for shared experiences that connect billions of users worldwide. Investors love this story. The stock has tripled this year, surpassing the market cap of Warner/Discovery.
Hollywood, entertainment media, and many other industries have already been buffeted by the cultural changes wrought by technology, but we've not seen anything as disruptive as AI since the arrival of the web browser in 1993. Audience erosion has been happening for decades but AI is going to put a rocket under it. On the plus side, AI will fix the problem of skyrocketing production costs, leading to a new 'golden age' of filmmaking. Profits will return. Creatives will no longer be shackled by scarcity. There would be a parade except for the empty offices.
Sophocles said "there is no great gift from the gods that does not come with a curse." AI saves the entertainment business, but it's a job killer. And lower cost is not a sustainable advantage in a war with an algorithm, whose marginal cost is zero. Human made stories are never going away but when the war is over, they may not account for much of our attention.
This is the second in a series of stories that began with AI And Hollywood's Next Golden Age. There's much more to explore. In the coming weeks, I'll publish a series of follow-up essays examining what this disruption could mean for Hollywood, gaming, big tech, and pop culture.
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