Did Google’s Veo 3 Just Upend Video Production?

PLUS: The Redbox Collapse Is Getting Nasty

Author

Steve
May 27, 2025

Hola Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

Subscribe to get Hollywood Tech Nerds magically delivered to your inbox every Tuesday!

Did Google’s Veo 3 Just Upend Video Production?

Sometimes people write in and claim I’m a Luddite because I’m “anti-AI.” This is not true! What I maintain is a position of measured skepticism towards AI hype. This doesn’t mean I’m “anti-AI” any more than I was “anti-social media” or “anti-self-driving cars.” What I’m anti is taking what the tech industry tells you at face value whenever they’re promoting a new product.

In the early 2010s, tech would claim social media was going to revolutionize communication and change the world, bringing people closer together. Is that what it did? To me it mostly drove people insane with FOMO psychosis or rage-fueled engagement bait. Is your life better because you had access to Twitter or Facebook? Mine isn’t!

This is all to preface my thoughts on Google’s Veo 3 reveal. Veo 3 is Google’s newest AI video generator, and naturally it has the hype beasts at publications like Axios repeating the usual breathless descriptions:

Veo 3… generates clips that most users online can't seem to distinguish from those made by human filmmakers and actors… amazing viewers with their realism — and also terrifying them with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred.

Do you agree?

I suppose I am terrified, mainly that someone would watch these and not be able to “distinguish from those made by human filmmakers and actors… terrifying them with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred.” However, I’ve been terrified by that for years at this point because it’s already been the case:

Check out these ultra-realistic Veo 3 faces!

Wow, just like real life!

Don’t get me wrong, Veo 3 is very cool and I look forward to using it to convince my Aunt Joan that on video she promised me the swampland where her trailer burned down in a failed insurance scam. Jokes aside, I’m sure there will be exciting use cases to explore.

However, I would continue to be cautious about these types of claims:

I can become a Steven Spielberg today?! Then why haven’t I seen just one Veo 3 clip where the scene extends beyond one shot?

A more realistic, less hypey way to show off Veo 3 potential capabilities is available via this DataCamp walkthrough. Again: pretty cool! But don’t let the AI grifters convince you it does things that it doesn’t.

The Redbox Collapse Is Getting Nasty

I’ve written in the past about one of the Crackle/Redbox/Chicken Soup for the Soul bankruptcy, specifically about how the Redbox customer base is now going basically unserved.

I wanted to zoom out just a bit and direct you to journalist Janko Roettgers’s fantastic ongoing reporting on the bankruptcy’s fallout over at his excellent newsletter Lowpass. From Roettgers:

The executive leadership of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, the corporate owner of Redbox and a handful of streaming ventures, is being targeted by an explosive new lawsuit: George L. Miller, the trustee put in charge of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s bankruptcy case, alleges in a complaint filed last month that the company’s former CEO Bill Rouhana treated Redbox and its sister companies “as his personal piggy bank [...] while neglecting the most basic corporate duties.”

Redbox, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment and related companies were “victim of mismanagement and pillaging by insiders on a scale rarely seen with public companies,” the filing alleges.

Roettgers has the full complaint linked in his article and it’s crazy. Some media companies are mismanaged in bizarre, silly ways and others like CSSE are mismanaged in destructive, devastating ways.

A personal plea: I was once colleagues with many former Crackle employees, many of whom are now jobless, and I would love to connect them to entities hiring people with their skillsets. Email me at [email protected] if you’re interested in being connected with any of these displaced employees!

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Is Veo 3 worth the money? (link)

How to make the ultimate video game adaptation. (link)

Why carmakers are ditching touchscreens for buttons again. (link)