I was 8 years old when I saw Star Wars in the theaters in the summer of 1977. When that Star Destroyer crawled across the screen in the opening scene, I had never seen anything like it. Nobody had. At the packed movie theater, our collective jaws dropped. For two hours, I lived in a galaxy far, far away, because George Lucas showed me something I could only imagine before that moment.<\/p>\n
That feeling had a name, though I didn\u2019t know it then: awe<\/a>.<\/p>\n A year later, Superman took flight, and we really did believe a man could fly. Then came Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, and Terminator 2. In 1993, Steven Spielberg and the brilliant Steve \u201cSpaz\u201d Williams at Industrial Light & Magic gave us Jurassic Park and the most realistic dinosaurs we\u2019d ever seen. Williams\u2019 groundbreaking work changed the course of cinema forever. The Matrix gave us \u201cbullet time.\u201d Peter Jackson\u2019s The Lord of the Rings trilogy created an entire world. The Marvel movies made us marvel.<\/p>\n What made them magical was simple: We had never seen anything like them before.<\/p>\n With the progress we’ve evolved to make, we\u2019ve inadvertently ruined the magic.<\/p>\n The Bottlenecks That Made Magic<\/p>\n For most of cinema\u2019s history, there was a bottleneck between imagination<\/a> and depiction. We could dream up fantastic things, but we couldn\u2019t show them visually. That constraint was the secret ingredient of movie magic. The bottleneck created scarcity. And scarcity is what makes something precious, not abundance. If everyone drove a Lamborghini, it would be merely a car.<\/p>\n CGI cracked open the first bottleneck. Suddenly, we could depict the impossible. But a second bottleneck held: cost. Only studios spending hundreds of millions could deliver the highest-quality visuals. A third bottleneck held too: access. We had to go to theaters to experience these spectacles, which made them communal events, shared cultural moments.<\/p>\n Netflix has a wonderful series, The Movies That Made Us<\/a>. I love it because it speaks to my experience and that of so many others. The movies made us because these shared cultural experiences connected us to the depths of ourselves and to the depths within others. Teens 30 years from now will not have \u201cThe Memes<\/a> That Made Us\u201d because who we are and what connects us cannot be found in the divided shallows.<\/p>\n Streaming dissolved the access bottleneck. We could watch blockbuster visuals from our couches. Then, we reduced awe to six inches on our iPhones. Our minds couldn\u2019t be blown when we could see everything, everywhere, all at once.<\/p>\n But one final bottleneck remained: Someone still had to actually make it professionally.<\/p>\n That last bottleneck just fell.<\/p>\n When Anyone Can Create the Next Avengers<\/p>\n Last month, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, an AI<\/a> video generation tool so powerful that Hollywood is in a panic<\/a>. Disney and Paramount have sent cease-and-desist letters. SAG-AFTRA has condemned it. Deadpool co-writer Rhett Reese said,<\/a> \u201cIn next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases.\u201d<\/p>\n My feed on X is flooded with AI-generated mashups: Predator versus Terminator, Homelander versus Superman, Bruce Lee versus Godzilla. They all look like $200 million studio productions. They were made on laptops.<\/p>\n The bottleneck is gone. Anyone can now create what only billion-dollar studios could produce a few years ago. And when everyone can make movie magic, the magic is gone.<\/p>\n The entire movie and television industry is now upended. Fellow Longhorn Matthew McConaughey sat down with Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet at a CNN and Variety town hall at UT Austin<\/a> recently and told a room full of students about AI: \u201cIt\u2019s coming. It\u2019s already here. Don\u2019t deny it.\u201d<\/p>\n A recent article by Matt Shumer, Something Big Is Happening<\/a>, went viral for a reason. It\u2019s not just happening in Hollywood: Every sector of our civilization is being radically transformed at an exponential rate\u2014medicine, science, coding, education<\/a>, entertainment, law, politics<\/a>\u2026everything.<\/p>\n The Popcorn Problem<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another way to think of what is happening. Something pairs with movies like nothing else: popcorn. A great movie paired with popcorn is an enhanced experience. They go together perfectly.<\/p>\n But what happens when we eat too much popcorn? We\u2019ve all been there. Halfway through the bucket, we feel bloated, greasy, and a little sick. The thing that enhanced the experience in small doses ruined it in excess. That\u2019s not an argument against popcorn. It\u2019s an argument against too much popcorn.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the problem with our screens. It\u2019s not that we\u2019re on them at all. It\u2019s that we\u2019re on them too much. We have more YouTube videos than we could watch in a thousand lifetimes. Once we\u2019re consuming the highest quality we can biologically tolerate, more will not make us happier. Our brains have moment-to-moment ceilings for pleasure and stimulation. For millions of years, the natural world kept us within these thresholds. Now we max out before lunch.<\/p>\n What is happening to our waistlines is happening to our psyches.<\/p>\n The Real Loss<\/p>\n What we\u2019re really losing is not just movie magic. We\u2019re losing the experience of awe itself. When I watched that Star Destroyer crawl overhead in 1977, my 8-year-old mind stretched to accommodate something entirely new. That experience is vanishing in a world where everything is instantly accessible and infinitely replicable.<\/p>\n My favorite line from my favorite movie keeps echoing in my mind. In Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty uses his dying breath not to rage<\/a> against humans, but to mourn the beauty he\u2019d witnessed:<\/p>\n \u201cAll those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.\u201d<\/p>\n A machine, mourning lost wonder. If that doesn\u2019t describe where we are, nothing does.<\/p>\n The Hollywood we know and love is history. We can\u2019t stop that. But we can transform what comes next. Because the real magic was never the technology. It was the shared experiences of awe.<\/p>\n When everyone saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, it connected us. That was something deeper than entertainment. Friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and a brilliant team brought us movie magic. It was an interconnected experience of awe. As we fragment into millions of personalized content bubbles, each generating our own private spectacles, we lose the connective tissue that holds us together.<\/p>\n