Influencing Younger Audiences Back Into the Theater

PLUS: Yet Another Hollywood Reporter AI Story Pushes Me to the Brink of Insanity

Author

Steve
October 21, 2025

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Influencing Younger Audiences Back Into the Theater

My frequent adversaries (in a very one-sided way of course, I’m sure they have no idea who I am!) at The Hollywood Reporter have put out an interesting piece about the increasing importance of influencers to Hollywood.

Now, it wouldn’t be THR without a misbegotten AI section, this time:

“Ultimately, AI helps the creator economy because it makes it so much easier to create content,” says Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat, a banking and finance company for creators. “I think we’re going to see either the existing leaders adapt to AI or a new generation for whom AI is part of their workflow.” Fully AI-generated creators already are garnering popularity. Evan Britton, CEO of Famous Birthdays, which is like a Wikipedia for influencers, says it launched AI creators in its database this year. “We’re seeing them rise,” he says. “[AI creators] are clearly going to be part of the ecosystem.”

“Fully AI-generated creators already are garnering popularity,” which we will demonstrate by quoting some guy. Argggghhh! Who are the AI-generated creators? Any details???

Anyway, I don’t need to repeat my generative AI dementia here (that’s for the story below). Contextually I read this article in light of the mostly-disappointing box office returns from a lot of recent fall movie releases. This sums it up well:

Regular readers know increasing and habitualizing theatergoing is one of my regular obsessions. It’s long been my position that theatrical box office has struggled over the past few years due to a toxic combination of the aftereffects of the pandemic, the shortening or elimination of theatrical windows, the inability to make moviegoing an “event” that people want to be a part of, the counterproductive goals of the streaming services, the degradation of exhibitor quality, and badly cultivating younger audiences. Without addressing these problems holistically, we will continue to see diminishing box office returns outside of large-scale tentpole theatrical events.

The unspoken theme of THR’s influencer article is the late and reluctant realization by the business that many younger folks get their entertainment from influencers like streamers and TikTok creators. Hollywood’s solution to this has often been Band-Aids: just absorb them into their product. This always seems sort of pointless to me; if you enjoy watching a personality in one specific context, it does not follow you will in every other context. It’s like making a movie where your lead actors are the winner and runner-up of American Idol:

Hollywood’s other solution has been to force actors and directors into increasingly-depraved games in order to drive eyeballs; a format pioneered by the generally-respectable Hot Ones but now endemic to all press junkets. Sorry A-listers, Jigsaw runs the junkets now! Got a movie to promote? Do you want to play a game?

@varietymagazine

#BobOdenkirk on if he remembers his iconic lines from "Nobody."

Again, none of this is worthwhile if the rest of the issues with moviegoing go unaddressed, and frankly in the sample case of Nobody 2 above, it seems silly to me to be doing goofy TikToks to promote an R-rated action movie. Is anyone who makes these marketing decisions under the age of 40?

Yet Another Hollywood Reporter AI Story Pushes Me to the Brink of Insanity

I received some good responses to a recent tweet of mine:

My thesis is basically surmised in my piece The Entertainment Press is Failing Its Readers, so I don’t need to rehash it again. That said, I am going to continue citing these stories and their issues as I see them, because I really do feel like the business is being led to some very bad outcomes from the press’s gormless approach to claims made by AI companies.

Here’s another brain-melting example from (who else?) The Hollywood Reporter in an article with the headline AI Made Her Rich. Now She Wants to Make Movies. Wow, AI made article subject Anita Verma-Lallian rich??? That’s incredible! Naturally we quickly discover it’s not AI that made her rich, but:

The Arizona real-estate developer, 43, has been developing land across the Grand Canyon State for data centers for several years, cashing in on tech companies’ voracious need for spaces to power their AI operations.

Right up top THR can’t help itself but frame the success of a real estate developer as “getting rich from AI.” Which, sure, in the most technical sense that is sort of true in that data centers form the backbone of generative AI being developed by the hyperscalers, but it’s not like Verma-Lallian is creating AI products of any kind. These are real estate riches!

Nevertheless, as our industry press continues to do with anyone who comes to them with an AI angle, the entire story is framed around Verma-Lallian using AI in some sort of cool unusual way, when it just sounds like she’s outsourcing her decision-making to ChatGPT:

Verma-Lallian also has gravitated to AI in her professional life, using it to guide decisions on which properties to buy, judge the commercial potential of scripts and even translate Hollywood speak; she recently ran an email from an entertainment power broker through an AI model to learn that they were not saying what she thought they were saying.

A successful businesswoman in her 40s needs an AI model to glean subtext from an “entertainment power broker” who was “not saying what she thought they were saying”? Wouldn’t this prompt you to ask for the email exchange? Wouldn’t you inquire why an AI model would be superior to one’s own critical thinking honed through years of real estate work when said models are notoriously prone to hallucination and sycophancy? Wouldn’t you do any sort of pushback on someone making statements like this?

The backlot will feature an “AI studio” too, she says, though how a physical space will be optimized for technology meant to be used on computers remains unclear.

It’s unclear because it’s just nonsense utilized for the purpose of getting you to write about it. And it works!

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

The scary VFX of The Conjuring: Last Rites. (link)

How Derek Cianfrance lightened up for Roofman. (link)

How is Anthropic making any revenue? (link)