The actor, who helped write the script for the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, has publicly admitted that artificial intelligence could end his career.
February 10th, Irish film director Ruairi Robinson I posted the video on X and it immediately went viral.
It was a short video, maybe 14 seconds long, and looked like this: tom cruise and brad pitt Trapped in a rooftop brawl above the ruined city skyline. The punch landed with great weight. The camera moved as if a professional cinematographer was behind it. The sound design was layered and believable.
None of it was real.
Robinson is an Oscar-nominated short film director who previously directed live-action films. Akira Warner Bros. used the following method to generate the entire sequence. Seadance 2.0new AI video tools part time dancethe Chinese technology giant behind TikTok. This tool takes a few lines of text and turns them into incredibly lifelike, cinematic video clips.
His caption was casual, almost perplexing. “This was a two-line prompt for Seadance 2. If Hollywood is cooked, maybe everyone is right. If Hollywood is cooked, everyone is overcooked.”
The post has come off. As of this writing, it has been viewed over 1.3 million times.
Robinson didn’t stop there. Over the next few hours, he posted variations from the same destroyed rooftop. brad pitt Fighting Zombie Ninjas (44K views), cruise and pit There was a video in which he teamed up with a robot to fight (63,000 views), and another with the caption simply “Jeffrey Epstein knew too much” (2.4 million views). Same tools, same rooftop, different fever dreams. Each one looked like a scene from a movie that didn’t exist.
“I don’t want to say it. It might be over.”
Then the viral video sparked a wake-up call for the industry.
Rhett Reese — Screenwriter dead pool trilogy, zombielandand deadpool & wolverinelast year grossed $1.338 billion worldwide. A quote-tweet of a clip of Robinson containing seven words sent grenades into group chats across Hollywood.
“I hate to say it, but it might be over.”
This isn’t some random tech influencer doing a “Hollywood is Cooking” routine. This is one of the most commercially successful screenwriters alive. The man whose last movie broke box office records and revived the entire series. And he has publicly stated that the game may have already been lost.
Mr. Rees doubled down on his efforts the next day, writing, “Soon, a single person will be able to sit down at a computer and create a film that is almost indistinguishable from studio productions.”
No one asked Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt
100% AI generated. Image credit: @RuairiRobinson/X
Here’s the part of this story that every celebrity should pay attention to:
neither tom cruise or brad pitt I allowed them to use my face. Neither was consulted. Neither was compensated. A filmmaker typed two lines into a text box, and an AI tool developed by a Chinese technology company generated a hyper-realistic video of two of the most famous actors on the planet throwing punches on a rooftop.
And it goes beyond Cruise and Pitt.
Within days, users generated AI videos featuring live-action Dragon Ball characters and One Piece scenes in photorealistic settings. Will Smith The spaghetti monster battle that became a meme benchmark. Entire fictional worlds owned by multi-billion dollar studios were being recreated by strangers on the internet using a few words and free tools.
ByteDance had to intervene almost immediately. After users discovered that the tool was capable of producing photorealistic clones of realistic humans with synthesized voices that matched real speech, the company took action to block users from uploading real human faces as source material. “We do not allow photos or videos that resemble real people to be used as reference subjects,” the company said in a statement.
The ban came after the damage had already been done. Video of Cruz and Pitt was already circulating online. The conversation had already changed.
The internet has already chosen a side
The comments below Robinson’s post and Reese’s response tell you all about where this is going.
One camp sees this as the end of the closed-door industry. The idea is that anyone with a story in their head can bring it to the screen without needing a studio, budget, or permission. The other camp sees something much darker. An industry full of actors, animators, VFX artists, and writers who watch machines do a rough approximation of their life’s work for free.
The difference this time is who is sounding the alarm. The “Hollywood is Cooked” crowd has been saying this for years. But the person who wrote it dead pool — The series is built on irreverence and not taking anything too seriously — Posting “Maybe we’re done” without irony changes the conversation forever.
Seedance 2.0 is currently in beta and can be accessed through ByteDance’s platform using your Douyin account, but full global rollout is expected around February 24th.
Regardless of Hollywood’s reaction, time is ticking.
