This.
A lot of casual viewers will settle for animated cartoons. Streaming has put this tendency on steroids: formulaic movies, considered as generic "content" for the lowest common denominator global audience, stripped of the particularities that make characters interesting and unpredictable.
Many movies have always been like this, and that's fine for casual escapism. Serious filmmakers -- writers, directors and actors being the core of the enterprise -- have always striven for more. At the risk of sounding pretentious, they want to produce "art," something that touches intangibles. When they succeed -- and most films don't rise to that level -- they produce something of lasting value.
In any given production, the writing, direction or acting may carry the enterprise. In the very best films, all three connect, and something unique is created. The collaboration is important; it's a dialogue among the three key participants (and then the rest of the filmmaking team added into the mix), which then elevates into a dialogue with the viewing audiences. The casual couch potato views may not care; if all they want is low value escapist fare, they can find plenty of it. But do enough people want something better to support the quality end of the market?
It is ultimately the actors who have to breathe life into the characters and script, but they need the writer to provide the raw material and a director who can recognize the assets he has and put them together for best effect.
Let one example suffice. Same play, same script, same song, different direction (one for the movie we've all seen, the second a stage adaptation) and different actresses:
Can AI do this, if not now then in the near future? Probably, if it has been trained on Liza Minelli or Jane Horrocks. But that's a theft of intellectual property, and it means endless repetitions of a Liza Minelli or Jane Horrocks interpretation, which will get boring pretty fast. Can AI contribute something new? Ah, that's the question. Who is feeding the prompts? A purple haired woke freak or a serious person with something to say? Ultimately, AI will probably allow us all to make our own version -- and that means endless projections of ourselves, which is a straight road into endless projections of a fundamentally solipsistic, utterly self-absorbed reflection of ourselves. Oh, goody ... but that seems to be where popular culture is headed: me, me, me, with the universe designed for fantasy wish fulfilment. And that will get boring even faster than watching Liza Minnelli and/or Jane Horrocks in an endless repetitive loop.
The film industry has been exploring this quite explicitly for some time, with films involving AI characters. Two fairly recent examples that I've recommended before are After Yang and "I'm Your Man. Both are excellent. In both movies, the AI character is a model citizen. Can we distinguish good programming from good character? If the illusion is good enough, do we even want to try? "I'm Your Man. raises this point very explicitly. After Yang has perhaps the most subtle Turing test I've ever seen. Neither film tries to dictate a solution; they paint a picture and invite you to think.
I'm still not convinced AI can do this, not without simply stealing the intellectual property produced by real humans.
Well said!