The AI 25: The Exclusive Group of People Shaping the Future of Hollywood - hollywoodreporter.com

Members of a diverse and quietly powerful clan are competing to make over entertainment in their image. Who will prevail? By Steven Zeitchik, Julian Sancton May 1, 2026 Most of Hollywood has long-established groups of power players — you know who’s calling the shots because they’ve called them so many times before. Not so for Hollywood and AI. The latest tech is a Wild West — a wide-open space practically inviting new personalities to come in and conquer. And conquer they have. A burgeoning group of figures — from tech execs to established filmmakers, activists to entrepreneurs — have flooded these vast plains hoping to dominate and make future-Hollywood look the way they think it should (and make lots of entertainment and, sometimes, money in the process). With this in mind, THR devised the AI 25 — a list of the most powerful people in this burgeoning area of Hollywood AI as it stands at this very moment. As you’ll see from the alphabetical list below, they come from wildly different backgrounds and often have extremely diverse agendas. But each of them has a vision for what Hollywood in the AI Age should look like — and the leverage to make that vision happen. For a while there, it seemed like Affleck would emerge as a leader of Hollywood’s anti-AI resistance. In late 2024, the actor showed up, rather incongruously, at a CNBC summit, displaying an unexpectedly deep understanding of the inner workings of the technology, and voiced an eloquent defense of human creativity against the Gen-AI onslaught: “The movies will be one of the last things … to be replaced by AI.” He added, in a pithy soundbite that soothed some of the industry’s anguish: “AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan; it cannot write you Shakespeare.” He echoed the sentiment a year later, telling Joe Rogan that AI writing is “really shitty” because “by its nature, it goes to the mean.” While those skeptical comments made the headlines — and gave the succor to the disbelievers — Affleck also expressed his belief that AI could be more effective at below-the-line tasks: “I wouldn’t want to be in the visual effects business,” he said. “They’re in trouble.” Then, in March, he made an announcement that helped explain why he was so articulate on the matter: He had secretly co-founded an AI postproduction startup called InterPositive that was acquired by Netflix in a deal estimated by some to be worth $600 million. If you can’t beat ’em …