An insurrectionist robot Unleashed by an insane inventor in Fritz Lang Metropolis. HAL 9000 is sabotaging the manned Jupiter mission in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet is the global self-aware defense network which seeks to eliminate humanity in all its forms. Terminator franchise.
Hollywood The world has always been awash with audacious and outrageous depictions. artificial intelligence It is not clear how AI could change the future of the human species. The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into studio systems and the now inevitable interactions we have with them has severely harmed the film genre.
It’s understandable why screenwriters, studios, and producers have returned to AI over the past few years. After all, the topic has been the source of such intense debate in the film industry. This is a major factor in the 2023 labor strikes AI’s threat to jobs in the creative sector was not a new one. But the novelty quickly faded.
Take a look at M3GANThe film was a horror comedy about an artificially-intelligent doll killing people. box-office smash. A sequel to last year’s film? The film was a critical and commercial failure. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning The Entity was a rogue AI introduced by 2023 to be the last adversary of Ethan Hunt. This blockbuster spy film’s resolution to its cliffhanger ended. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning Both (2025) and its predecessor (2005) have underperformed their predecessors, but neither has justified the cost.
This latest AI bomb has been released. Mercy, a crime thriller starring Chris Pratt as an LAPD detective strapped into a chair who has 90 minutes to pull enough evidence from security cameras and phone records to convince a stern judge bot (Rebecca Ferguson) that he didn’t kill his wife—or else face instant execution. One reviewer, despite the film’s release in January this year, has declared that it is “the worst movie of 2026“, and many US moviegoers made that decision based on the trailer. The movie trailer almost makes it seem as though no one cares if the fictional software could possibly save a person’s life, when actual health insurance claims for real people are being processed. denied by algorithms already.
Few people saw the movie. Mercy This film failed to live up to its dystopian setting, failing in its attempt at a modernized medieval justice system and ignoring the ethical implications of a state that is so reliant on surveillance. Spoiler alert: Pratt’s character and the artificial intelligence team up at the end of the film to combat the terrorists. You can also read about the real-time synchronization of your smartphone. The bot starts to display unrobotic emotions and show doubts, manifested as bugs in the software. By the end, Pratt is delivering a true groaner of a we’re-not-so-different speech to the holographic Ferguson. “Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” He says. “And we learn.”
The naive optimism about AI progressing towards enlightenment is dated, but you’re also reminded how prophetically pessimistic something like Paul Verhoeven’s novel was. RoboCopIn addressing an upcoming future of cybernetic facism, the now nearly 40-year-old was addressing. The current trend is not that pitch-black violent satire but rather propaganda about AIs being scary initially, yet secretly beneficial. (See also: Tron: AresDisney’s misguided attempts to use an older IP in the age of big language models is another train wreck for 2025.
The new Time Studios series may have been sparked by the belief that artificial intelligence has a certain inherent value or honour. On This Day…1776. The project, which was conceived as an account in real-time of the year that the American colonies gained independence from Britain’s crown, is a series of YouTube videos created by Google DeepMind. However actual actors provide voiceovers. Darren Aronofsky, the acclaimed director and creative producer of Primordial Soup (a Google-backed studio that explored AI’s applications in filmmaking), was executive producing this project. Aronofsky, and the rest of his company, are probably not helping matters by valuing the nation’s founding fathers with the same aesthetic as has defined the authoritarian meme culture Donald Trump is in his second term.
