the marginal cost of a film is approaching zero.
if i concentrate very hard, ai can write a macro essay, though it still requires hours of back and forward. and the occasional acid tantrum when it hallucinates and makes shit up. the same tool can also lay visuals and a score that passes for cinema at a cost that would have seemed like science fiction five years ago. think of that: hollywood spent a century hoarding an industrial machine around cameras, crews, studio lots and distribution, and much of it is collapsing into a subscription and a graphics card. what the studios haven’t worked out yet is that the scarcity they monetised was never the creative act. it was the cost of making the thing.
this is the specific failure mode of infinite content: not that it’s bad, but that it’s known to be manufactured, and manufactured suspense is a different biological experience than the thing it’s imitating.
hollywood and the streamers spent north of $95 billion on content in 2025 and produced what felt, from inside the industry, like an avalanche. it wasn’t. youtube’s users uploaded 500 hours of video every minute, enough to match the annual output of global premium scripted entertainment in under two hours. suddenly $95 billion looks less like abundance and more like a very expensive way of competing with something the internet now produces almost without limit.
the iphone has been shooting 4k since 2015. ai now does in an afternoon what a post-production house used to bill six figures for, and the cost curve is still falling. the streaming wars were supposed to be about capturing audiences. instead they became a race against a supply function with no natural ceiling.
when marginal cost approaches zero, price follows.
