As studios fixate on artificial intelligence, a more profound threat is quietly reshaping global cinema: the erosion of Hollywood’s cultural centrality in an increasingly plural cinematic world.
One of the recurring themes of this essay is the tension between optimisation and discovery. That is partly why I’ve started using Curated. At a time when so much of our online experience is organised around feeds, rankings and algorithmic predictions, Curated takes a quieter approach. There is no timeline to keep up with and nothing competing for your attention. It is simply a personal collection that grows over time, shaped by your own choices rather than someone else’s algorithm. In an age of endless recommendations, there is something surprisingly satisfying about curating your own world.
If contemporary cinema has a dominant anxiety, it is artificial intelligence. Studio executives discuss automation with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, screenwriters worry about algorithmically generated scripts, and actors increasingly find themselves confronting the prospect of digital replication. The future, we are told, may belong to machines.
Yet there is something revealing about Hollywood’s fixation on AI. Beneath the industry’s concern with technological disruption lies a quieter and potentially more consequential question. What if Hollywood’s greatest challenge is not that machines are becoming capable of making films, but that the world no longer looks to Hollywood as the unquestioned centre of cinema itself?
For much of the twentieth century, such a proposition would have appeared absurd. Hollywood was not merely the world’s most powerful film industry. It was cinema’s organising principle, the gravitational force around which global film culture revolved. American films dominated international distribution, American stars occupied a unique position within the popular imagination, and American studios possessed an unparalleled capacity to shape how audiences understood both cinema and modernity. To speak of film was often, implicitly, to speak of Hollywood.
That assumption has become increasingly difficult to sustain.
The question is not whether Hollywood remains powerful. Its economic dominance remains extraordinary, while its capacity to command attention continues to dwarf that of most national cinemas. Rather, the question is whether power still translates into cultural centrality. More specifically, it is whether Hollywood continues to occupy the symbolic position it once held within the global imagination.
The answer can perhaps be found not in the box office but in the spaces where cinema continues to define itself. Consider the films that have most animated critical discussion over the past decade. While Hollywood remains capable of producing commercial phenomena, many of the works that have shaped contemporary cinephilia have emerged elsewhere. Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light are united not by geography but by what their success represents. Each demonstrated that international audiences are increasingly willing to engage with cinema on its own terms rather than through Hollywood’s interpretative framework.
Parasite’s triumph at the Academy Awards was widely treated as a historic breakthrough. In retrospect, it appears more significant as a symptom than an exception. The film did not achieve international success by diluting its South Korean identity. If anything, its power derived from its specificity, from its ability to transform the social realities of contemporary Seoul into a drama that resonated far beyond its national context. What travelled was not cultural neutrality but cultural particularity.
The same pattern has repeated itself across the international festival circuit. From Iranian social realism to Romanian minimalism, from the continuing influence of East Asian cinema to the emergence of new voices across Latin America and South Asia, the most compelling developments in contemporary cinema increasingly resist incorporation into a Hollywood centred narrative. They arrive from different traditions, pursue different aesthetic priorities and often operate according to entirely different assumptions about what cinema should be.
Streaming platforms have accelerated this transformation in ways that remain insufficiently appreciated. Their most significant achievement may not have been the globalisation of Hollywood but the globalisation of access. Viewers who once depended upon domestic distributors, specialist cinemas or late night television schedules now move effortlessly between national cinemas. The result has not been the disappearance of Hollywood but the erosion of its exclusivity. American cinema remains visible everywhere. The difference is that it is no longer alone.
This is where the discussion surrounding artificial intelligence becomes particularly revealing. Hollywood often treats AI as a threat emerging from outside the industry. Yet part of the unease surrounding artificial intelligence stems from the suspicion that much contemporary blockbuster filmmaking already operates according to algorithmic logic. Franchises expand indefinitely, intellectual property is recycled with industrial efficiency, and narrative structures become increasingly familiar. The anxiety surrounding AI is therefore not merely technological. It reflects a growing concern that creativity has already become subordinate to optimisation.
An algorithm may eventually generate a screenplay. What it cannot explain is why so much of cinema’s artistic vitality now appears elsewhere.
Hollywood’s predicament resembles that of any dominant institution confronting a more plural world. It remains powerful, influential and commercially successful. What has changed is the environment in which that power operates. The post Cold War fantasy of a single cultural centre has given way to a more dispersed landscape in which authority is fragmented across multiple sites. Cinema, like geopolitics, has become increasingly multipolar.
This does not mean Hollywood is in decline. Decline implies replacement. What we are witnessing is something subtler. Hollywood is being repositioned. It remains the most powerful actor within global cinema, but it no longer enjoys a monopoly on cinematic significance. Audiences, critics and filmmakers increasingly inhabit an international ecosystem whose reference points extend far beyond Los Angeles.
Artificial intelligence has become Hollywood’s preferred object of anxiety because it presents the industry’s predicament as a technological problem. Technological problems are reassuring. They imply solutions. Better regulation, new business models, labour protections or technical safeguards can all be imagined as responses. Yet the more profound challenge facing Hollywood cannot be addressed so easily because it originates not outside the industry but within it.
For decades, Hollywood’s extraordinary influence rested upon its ability to combine commercial appeal with artistic confidence. Increasingly, however, the pursuit of optimisation has displaced the pursuit of originality. Films are expected to perform simultaneously across continents, demographics and platforms. Cultural specificity is softened in favour of universal accessibility, narrative risk is reduced in favour of predictability, and creativity becomes subordinate to scalability. In attempting to speak to everyone and offend no one, Hollywood has diminished its ability to surprise anyone. Ask Disney.
The irony is that the same technological systems that enabled Hollywood to expand its reach have also exposed audiences to alternatives. Streaming platforms did not simply globalise American cinema. They globalised access to cinema itself. Viewers who once encountered the world primarily through Hollywood’s lens now move directly between different cinematic traditions, discovering forms of storytelling that are often more culturally rooted, aesthetically adventurous and psychologically complex.
What Hollywood confronts, therefore, is not the prospect of replacement by machines but the consequences of a more plural cinematic culture. The real disruption is not artificial intelligence. It is the erosion of exclusivity. The world no longer depends upon Hollywood to imagine itself.
In this sense, the industry’s anxiety about AI may be misplaced. The greatest threat to Hollywood is not that algorithms will learn to make films. It is that audiences, critics and filmmakers have become increasingly comfortable looking elsewhere.
The future of cinema may still pass through Hollywood.
It simply no longer revolves around it.
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