piracy

yup. anti-piracy is about control, not profits. this is trivial to deduce from the simple fact that no one ever measures a drm solution's performance in total sales recovered, they only ever whine about hypothetical lost ones, which is the corporate equivalent of sideways for attention, long way for effect

I can't wait to see the split in the next decade or so between AI films from the giants and boutique offerings that feature all-human casts.

In sure the former will be dazzling crap/profit machines, and the latter to be a slow death as people begin to come of age without any particular desire to watch real people when they can see the craziest shit created using AI. I wonder how long before the CGI will be so good that it will become impossible to tell the difference? I wonder how long before you can tailor the characters in a movie like you can tailor your own game avatars? How long before piracy isn't stealing IP but actually creating your own versions of movies that can riff of the original and even improve upon them, creating a subculture of film creators that are hunted and aggressively prosecuted by the major content creators?

I'm a bit apprehensive about that world, but it's exciting to be on the cusp of such a potential reorganizing of the film world we know.