300 Shows, Adoption at a Mass Level

More and more, we're seeing articles about GenAI showing up in real workflows at the major creative level. It's not experiments, not demos anymore. Real work. Enterprise level, major corporations, major studios, you name it. Last week it was Netflix, telling shareholders that AI tools touched around 300 of its shows and movies in 2026 so far. Concept, previz, filming, and post, with most of the work landing in post.

We want these articles to serve as a guide and a forward way to understand the opportunity in front of us. They're here to prove a point: this stuff works, or can work, and the growth rate we're seeing means what's in use now is just the beginning of what we'll see in the coming months and years.

There's also a detail worth considering here. Three hundred titles, and did you notice a single one? The work on The American Experiment was crowd enhancement, historical battle sequences, establishing shots. Brasil 70, same family of work. It didn't show up as a genre or a gimmick. It disappeared into the pipeline, something you would never notice. If done right anyways. Top of the line creative work comes first, that's the only way this can matter. Meeting that level.

Here is where it is meeting that level and what genuinely excites me is buried in Netflix's own letter: in some cases, productions would have had to leave key shots and sequences on the floor without these tools. It's not only about cost, as many people commonly believe. It makes a completed project whole. Further, GenAI has an incredible ability to take projects that would never get greenlit, because of the price point, because of logistics, because of the sheer resources they'd demand, and turn them into greenlights.

That's the thing to understand about this moment. The fear is that we'll have fewer shows because of cost pressure. I think the opposite is coming. Because of GenAI, we could have far more shows. Far more options for people to tell stories. Far more things to watch, to engage with, to have a relationship with.

As a storyteller, as a creative, and as someone who wants to see this industry thrive, that's what I care about. And not just the industry as an abstraction. Individual creators thriving. People telling stories they could not tell before because they didn't have the money, didn't have the crew, didn't have the resources to pull it off. GenAI lets them do exactly that.

So yes, 300 shows is a really huge deal. It means this technology is already integrated across an enormous range of real projects, and the field is still wide open. What we have now will not be what we have three months from now, six months from now, a year from now. The tools will change. The platforms will change. And there will be opportunities to use all of it to tell genuinely thoughtful, compelling, exciting human stories.

We've watched this movie before. VFX let us tell unbelievable stories and do incredible things on so many of the projects we love. Pirates of the Caribbean. Jurassic Park. Terminator 2. There was a stretch when the technology was the headline, and then it matured, the craft matured around it, and it became invisible infrastructure underneath great storytelling. GenAI is on the same path, and it's going to lead to the next generation of storytellers, filmmakers, and creators telling stories we've never seen before, from perspectives that have never had the means to reach a screen.

I'll add one thing from the production seat, because it's where I spend my days: the studios and creators who win this transition won't be the ones with the most tool access. They'll be the ones who build the systems around the tools, the review loops where taste gets applied, so quality holds while output scales. That's the real work of the next few years, and honestly, it's the fun part.

The number in next year's shareholder letter will be bigger. To me, that's not a threat. That's more stories, more storytellers, and a wide open field for anyone willing to learn the craft of using these tools well. That is the thing that's going to change all the work we do here, in a really positive way.