alt Hacker NewsIf you haven't been following the current explosion of video gen models, including all the content you see on social media, you should pay attention.
I have no doubt in my mind that right now, in August of 2026, given a couple of weeks, an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits, given a good amount of exploration/tinkering to fill the gaps that GenAI cannot currently do, (which is storyboarding, screenwriting, characters, and all the actual creative stuff), can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts.
The reason why this isn't happening en masse right now is that most creatives are probably not focused on generating feature films, but rather content that's more digestible by social media users.
I would expect to start seeing a LOT of development in the upcoming months as some form of commodification where generated content can be both high quality and tailored to the user.
Replies
There’s a technology fundamental driving the short form aspect too, current video models are all trained on <500 frame sequences and struggle to generate long shots. There are a lot of attempts in the literature to improve cross-generation coherence but there needs to be an architectural breakthrough or significant scaling improvement before longer continuous shots are practical. So you’d be making a really ADD feature film at the moment.
Then why isn’t there even one good, 2-minute video produced with AI yet? Can you share one?
A few months ago, Coca Cola couldn’t even make a good 1 minute commercial with millions of dollars and a whole team of video producers and editors. It ended up just being a montage of 5 second clips of animals smiling at Coca Cola trucks.
No job is forever. Tomorrow isn’t promised, and automation already did this—albeit more slowly—throughout the second half of the 20th century. Some people watched their jobs disappear and accepted that they’d become obsolete. Plenty of others pivoted.
The counterargument today is that we can pivot much faster. I’m typing this on a $2,000 Mac that can run Blender, render scenes, write code, edit video, and access tools that would have required a studio or a room full of specialized hardware not that long ago.
GenAI is empowering people to do things they simply could not do before. It’s here. The interesting question is: what are you going to do with it?
I think movie production may be approaching its YouTube moment. If the barriers to making something collapse, then make something worth watching. I’d rather see a small team with an actual idea than another $300 million spider man multiverse hot garbage sequel or guardians of the slop 600 assembled by committee, approved by a board after a slide deck, and polished into expensive slop.
If I'm understanding correctly. Replacing low budget advertising slop is the priority over replacing $100m movie budgets simply because they haven't gotten around to the latter yet. The capabilities are definitely there for the latter, just no one's bothering. Okay.
> I have no doubt in my mind that right now [...] an amateur with a high-end last-gen GPU or somebody with maybe a thousand bucks worth of AI credits [...] can crank out a high quality 1h+ feature film with only minor uncanny artifacts.
Then why are there no examples of this? There aren't even examples of steps towards it--the half hour film that's nearly production quality, etc.