The day approaches when AI will be able to create actors. They will never age. They could makes 50 Indiana Jones movies over a period of a century, if the public continues to want to see them. The AI actor could look and sound liked Harrison Ford, or Tom Cruise — or it could be a completely new construct that is made-to-order. But if the people like it, they can have it fresh and new until the seas run dry.
Yea eventually all hollywood movies will be nothing but fancy looking cartoons..
My guess is that Disney will be in the lead -- if it is not swallowed by a bigger fish, if the shareholders' revolt doesn't happen, if Norman Peltz's board challenge doesn't succeed, if, if, if. Disney's bread and butter since its inception until its recent mismanagement was animated films. The live action remakes were latecomers, mainly cash grabs, and generally inferior to the original animated versions, which were at least new forms (in the sense of telling classic children's stories through a new medium). Disney's biggest money maker in recent years has been Marvel -- which Disney bought and promptly ran into the ground -- and those are comic book characters, many of them masked, and are entirely dependent on special effects. The very first Star Wars movie was superb, but that franchise was on a long downslope long before Disney bought it and trashed it entirely. Star Wars characters are now such a comic book collection of aliens and freakish humans that I think live human actors could drop out entirely and not be missed.
I've seen reports that Bob Iger has spoken privately about this and even commented during the strike that this was the last time the studios would have to deal with the actors and writers. That may be an overstatement on his part or an out of context exaggeration of what he actually said, but has Disney ever made a movie in which great acting by great actors was the draw? Disney makes comic book movies. Actors are incidental.
The question that will arise is whether modern audiences have lost interest in acting as an art form.
Traditional movies were an evolution of the live stage, with filming techniques offering very powerful new ways to bridge the gap between audiences and the onstage, now onset, actors. The roots were theatrical and depended on real actors, some of them insanely talented, portraying real human emotions in their work. Part of the fascination with the medium of film, as with the live stage, is contrasting the approaches taken by different actors to the same themes. Cut out the live actors and everything will depend on the writers and programmers. It won't be the same. Some of it may be good, but over time, when every character is an artificially generated fantasy character that can do anything a writer wants it to do, I expect that quality will decline. I lost interest in comic book fantasy wish-fulfilment stories about the age of 10. The progressive left is now having a gnostic moment and is in full revolt against the reality principle. I hope this doesn't completely swallow the film industry.