Trading Endless Hours for Better Margins
Post-production is the unglamorous factory floor of filmmaking. Everything from colour grading and sound mixing to visual effects happens after the cameras finally stop rolling. It is famously slow, entirely unromantic, and extraordinarily expensive. I think the creative industries have always turned their noses up at automation, but generative AI has completely changed the calculus. Tasks that once took an army of tired editors weeks might soon take mere hours.
We are not just talking about minor efficiency tweaks here. If these massive studios can successfully automate parts of this bloated process, their profit margins could expand significantly. Companies like Warner Bros. Discovery, which has wrestled with rather well-documented mountains of debt, might actually find a lifeline in cheaper production pipelines. Meanwhile, Spotify is already aggressively using machine learning to personalise its audio infrastructure, proving that AI is just as crucial for delivery as it is for creation.