Can movies survive AI?
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Every time a new technology has arrived in the entertainment industry, the obituaries have followed close behind. Cinema would kill theatre. Television would kill cinema. Video games would kill television. Streaming would kill everything. And yet here we are — still watching, still playing, still queuing for experiences that make us feel something in the company of other people. Michael Stein has spent his career at the precise intersection of technology and storytelling, and he is not writing any obituaries just yet.
Stein's CV reads like a guided tour of the entertainment industry's most consequential moments: video game programmer, Pixar, Disney Imagineering, live events, theme parks, and now CTO at Journey — an agency that brings together six specialist companies under a single ambition: to create what it calls multi-dimensional experiences, connecting physical, digital and virtual worlds in ways that allow audiences to inhabit stories rather than simply observe them.
The most durable entertainment businesses are not the ones with the best technology. They are the ones with the best worlds — intellectual properties rich enough to sustain that communal engagement across physical venues, digital platforms, and everything in between. ABBA Voyage is a useful analogy: not a concert, not a film, but a world you step inside.
Cinema, Stein thinks, is in genuine difficulty — too much friction, too little specialness, a value proposition that streaming has quietly eroded. But new forms of entertainment always find their level, and the ones that endure are the ones that offer something irreplaceable — a shared physical presence, an emotional experience that a screen at home cannot replicate.
The question is not whether AI will transform the entertainment industry. It already is. The question is whether the people using it remember what they are actually trying to do.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why AI's greatest risk to the creative industries is not replacement but homogenisation — and how businesses that reach for the same tools will produce indistinguishable work, undermining the very distinctiveness that makes entertainment valuable.
What multi-dimensional experience actually means — and why IP has become the most important asset in the entertainment economy — as the most successful companies build worlds that audiences can inhabit across physical, digital and virtual touchpoints simultaneously.
Why the history of entertainment is a history of technology failing to kill what came before it — and what that long pattern tells us about the likely future of cinema, gaming, live experience, and the enduring human appetite for story.
Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.
