The future of Hollywood isn’t feeding prompts into vanilla gen AI models

Article excerpt

A Tribeca 2026 film called "Dear Upstairs Neighbors" demonstrates a markedly different approach to AI in filmmaking than the generic prompt-and-generate models dominating industry discourse. Rather than feeding text into off-the-shelf AI tools, the project's creators custom-trained Google DeepMind's Veo and Imagen models on their own concept art, essentially teaching the AI to match a specific visual language. The result represents one of the first AI-generated projects that might actually appeal to audiences, a significant shift from the visually inconsistent short clips current video models typically produce. The approach suggests Hollywood's real future lies not in democratized AI access but in specialized, tailored model training.