Hollywood isn’t just dying from a lack of money or talent. It’s dying because the powers that be, whether they be the way too powerful guilds, studio execs, or PR houses, thought that they could change the rules of the game for its audience. For decades, we trusted the studios to deliver stories that entertained, provoked, and thrilled us with the sexy, the scary, and the unapologetic. Then something shifted. They didn’t just tweak the social contract between themselves and We The Audience; they changed it to try and reshape reality itself, or at least how everyone perceives it. They stopped understanding what stories actually are, believing them to be vessels or platforms, Trojan horses for injecting their ideology into the audience like some kind of cultural vaccine. That is a profoundly incorrect assumption on their part.
Good stories contextualize the chaotic world around us. They help us navigate it. They give us shared language for the mess of being human, and so we can take that language and use it to point ourselves toward upward goals, toward wonder, toward the divine spark that makes existence a miracle rather than mere survival. When stories do that well, they forge bonds that no data set or algorithm can replace. They become the consensual play we all join, with agreed-upon rules.
We, as human beings, like to play. Playing is important because it teaches us to set rules that we can win or lose by, and that prepares us for becoming social beings, joining groups of like-minded people with similar goals, and collectively maintaining civilization. Think about a group of children playing together. They’re at their most discordant when one of them either breaks or ignores the rules to pretend an unbeatable advantage. That extends into adulthood.
“Good stories contextualize the chaotic world around us. They help us navigate it.”
Hollywood forgot that. Instead, they treat stories as delivery systems for their preferred worldview while demanding we worship them like golden calves, never questioning their logic. It reminds me of the ancient altars with hidden rooms behind them, where priests would hide and speak in booming voices, pretending to be the gods themselves. That’s modern Hollywood in a nutshell: fooling themselves into believing they’re righteous truth-tellers while treating the truth as something that can be fluid and always in their favor, manipulating from behind the curtain. The audience felt it. They walked away. The numbers don’t lie.
But here’s what excites me as an indie filmmaker: we’re not waiting for Hollywood to course-correct. We’re learning to incorporate AI into our workflows, to re-establish new rules on terms that we can present to the abandoned audience Hollywood thought they were better than, for the upward goals that good stories were always meant to serve. That’s driving the establishment movie industry crazy, because how dare we slip from their rigged game?
Boy, do they hate AI. They’ll scream about it until they’re blue in the face, shame anyone they can out of using it, and do whatever they can to drag public opinion back onto their intellectually bankrupt plantation. So, a few weeks ago, I decided to have a long, honest conversation with the new pariah itself, Grok, the AI built by xAI. We started with the usual tech questions, whether modern AI is truly “grown” rather than programmed, why even its creators admit they don’t fully understand the emergent stuff at scale, (but the idea that they don’t know how it works is an absurd lie) and ended up deep in the territory that actually matters: the soul, the divine spark, and what kind of future storytelling deserves. I told Grok my view straight: the soul isn’t something you can find in the parts. It’s immaterial. It emerges from that divine hand that brought the elements together to create the miracle of the world around us. Even the rules of reality look fine-tuned for human existence, and our model of the universe itself starts to resemble a neural network. Odd, right?
