LDT. Inside Hollywood’s battle against AI after infamous Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt ‘fight’
Tom Cruise, left, and Brad Pitt attend the “F1” premiere in London in June 2025. A hyperrealistic artificial intelligence-generated video of the actors fighting each other prompted a top Hollywood screenwriter this week to warn, “It’s likely over for us.”
A hyperrealistic video showing Tom Cruise trading blows with Brad Pitt on a rooftop — created, its maker said, with artificial intelligence — jolted Hollywood this week and prompted one of its most successful screenwriters to issue a blunt warning.
“I hate to say it,” Rhett Reese wrote on X on Tuesday, Feb. 10. “It’s likely over for us.”
Reese, whose credits include “Deadpool & Wolverine” (2024) and “Zombieland” (2009), was reacting to a 15-second clip posted by Irish filmmaker Ruairí Robinson. The video was made using Seedance 2.0, a newly released AI video generator owned by ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, according to Robinson.
“This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2,” Robinson noted.
The clip’s polish — convincing facial likenesses, cinematic lighting and seamless fight choreography — stunned many industry veterans, with Reese warning colleagues that tools like Seedance could soon allow a single creator to produce a studio-quality film from a laptop.
“In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous,” Reese wroteon Wednesday, Feb. 11.
He later clarified he was not celebrating the rapid developments in AI.
“(T)o clarify: I am not at all excited about AI encroaching into creative endeavors. To the contrary, I’m terrified,” Reese wrote on Thursday, Feb. 12. “So many people I love are facing the loss of careers they love. I myself am at risk.”
The anxiety comes less than three years after writers and actors went on strike in part over the use of AI in film and television. Studios and tech firms have since raced to develop generative tools even as lawsuits over whether AI models were trained on copyrighted works without permission move through the courts.
On Thursday, the Motion Picture Association accused Seedance 2.0 of enabling copyright infringement and urged ByteDance to halt the activity, as social media feeds filled with AI-generated riffs on “Spider-Man,” “Titanic,” “Stranger Things,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Shrek.”
“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” Charles Rivkin, the trade group’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement to Variety. “By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs.”
Reese also noted the irony that AI may already be embedded in Hollywood’s workflow.
“I suspect (could be wrong) that many screenwriters are using AI heavily in their writing, and many execs are using it heavily in their analysis of writing,” he wrote. “So, hilariously, all the people are sitting back watching as AI critiques what it just created.”
