Hollywood is Losing Viewers Due to AI Overload

A rebellious robot unleashed by a deranged inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. HAL 9000 sabotaging a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet, the self-aware global defense system intent on annihilating humanity throughout the Terminator series.

Hollywood has consistently showcased daring representations of artificial intelligence and its potential to reshape our existence. However, the swift incorporation of AI into the studio framework and our unavoidable encounters with it have significantly diluted the genre, along with the film medium itself.

It’s reasonable that screenwriters and studios would revisit the theme of AI in recent times, especially given the heated discussions it sparks in the industry. (A key factor behind the 2023 labor strikes was the perceived threat of AI to creative jobs.) Yet, the allure quickly wore off.

Take M3GAN, a campy horror film featuring a sentient doll that begins to murder individuals, released just a week after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022: It turned out to be a surprising box-office hit. The sequel from last year? Both critically and commercially unsuccessful. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning (2023) introduced a rogue AI named The Entity as the ultimate foe for Ethan Hunt and his team. However, the resolution of its cliff-hanger and blockbuster conclusion for the spy saga, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025), fell short of expectations, with neither installment justifying its production costs.

The most recent AI-themed failure is Mercy, a crime thriller starring Chris Pratt as an LAPD detective confined to a chair who has 90 minutes to gather enough evidence from security feeds and phone records to persuade a stern judge bot (Rebecca Ferguson) of his innocence in his wife’s murder—or face immediate execution. Released in January, one reviewer has already dubbed it “the worst movie of 2026,” and given its lukewarm ticket sales, many American moviegoers seem to have made their judgments based on the trailer alone. It’s as if the notion of a fictional software program potentially saving a life doesn’t resonate when algorithms are already denying real health insurance claims.

For the few who managed to watch it, Mercy fell short of its dystopian premise, failing to confront the ethics of a surveillance state and its anachronistic justice system, opting instead for superficial relativism. Spoiler alert: Pratt’s character and the AI eventually join forces to combat the true villains, as the bot begins exhibiting signs of unexpected emotion and uncertainty, which are displayed as program glitches. Ultimately, Pratt delivers a groaner of a we’re-all-human speech to the holographic Ferguson: “Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” he states. “And we learn.”

While the naive optimism about AI’s journey towards enlightenment feels outdated upon arrival, it also reminds us of the prescient cynicism displayed in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, nearly 40 years old, which tackled a future riddled with cybernetic authoritarianism. In contrast to such dark, violent satire, the current trend appears to be promoting narratives that suggest AIs are frightening initially but fundamentally benevolent. (See also: Tron: Ares, Disney’s ill-fated attempt to revive an old IP for the era of large language models, another cinematic failure of 2025.)

Indeed, the insistence on a latent value or morality within artificial intelligence might be driving the new Time Studios web series On This Day…1776. Designed as a detailed narrative of the year the American colonies declared their independence from British rule, it consists of brief YouTube videos generated partially by Google DeepMind (with actual actors providing voiceovers). The project has attracted significant attention and criticism, as acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky serves as executive producer via his creative studio Primordial Soup, established last year in collaboration with Google to explore AI’s role in filmmaking. It likely doesn’t help that Aronofsky and his team are glorifying the nation’s founders in a style that echoes the authoritarian meme culture prevalent during Donald Trump’s second term.