Six months ago, the question "how far away are we from AI movies?" felt reasonable to ask. Today it feels outdated, because they're already here.

Last week I attended a screening of Hell Grind, a 90-minute AI-generated movie that was made in just two weeks. On the same day, Dreams of Violets, a poignant docudrama inspired by real events from 47 years of Iranian civilian resistance, and which is 100% AI-generated, appeared at the Tribeca film festival. Then today I found myself watching something a bit lighter in tone — DEADLINES — on YouTube, a comedy-horror trailer made with AI that was funny enough to make me laugh out loud.

DEADLINES feels like it’s leaning strongly into the vibe of the new Apple TV horror/comedy series Widows Bay, where creepy things happen on a cursed island. But even though it clearly borrows from Apple's hit series, what surprised me was how funny the trailer actually was.

Ultimately, all three releases made me realize we've crossed an important threshold. The question is no longer whether AI can make movies. It can. The question now is whether anyone actually wants to watch them.

The difference between an AI movie and AI slop

For years, AI video demos have been judged on whether they could they fool us. Could they generate convincing actors, realistic camera movements, believable explosions and dramatic lighting? Every improvement felt like another step toward the goal of Hollywood-quality filmmaking.

Getting everything correct is important, because it only takes one obvious problem with an AI-generated scene to destroy the credibility of the whole movie. Now, though, the technical challenges are rapidly becoming the easy part — which makes what's going to come next so much more interesting.

What struck me most about DEADLINES was the quality of the writing. The trailer had actual jokes. It had timing. It had a clear sense of tone. It felt like somebody had a great idea and they wanted to share it.

But even though DEADLINES is a lot better than most AI videos, it’s still not perfect — the accent of the main character veers between several different regions of the UK, for instance. However, it’s good enough to make little things like this not really matter too much. That's the difference between a good movie and AI slop.

Nobody cares about the fingers anymore

While there's no need to count the fingers on people's hands these days, those questions about AI’s ability to realistically generate human beings haven’t gone away entirely; but they’re not the point anymore. When I watched DEADLINES I wasn’t paying attention to the visuals. Instead I was paying attention to the jokes, the pacing and the story, and deciding if I wanted to keep watching.

While DEADLINES knows it's using Windows Bay as its starting point, the trailer understands what it's parodying. It knows the language of prestige horror. It knows how to build a joke. It has an actual comedic premise.

That’s why I think things are about to change. The traditional gatekeepers of filmmaking are looking less secure than ever. The bottleneck isn’t really the production process, funding or access to filmmaking tools. Now, it's imagination and storytelling.

The bigger question now is whether AI filmmakers can create stories people genuinely care about. I don't know whether DEADLINES will ever become a full-length feature- film. What I do know is that it made me laugh, and that's a much more important milestone than generating another realistic explosion or perfectly rendered human face.

AI movies are already here. The race now is to make them worth watching.

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Graham is the Senior Editor for AI at TechRadar. With over 25 years of experience in both online and print journalism, Graham has worked for various market-leading tech brands including Computeractive, PC Pro, iMore, MacFormat, Mac|Life, Maximum PC, and more. He specializes in reporting on everything to do with AI and has appeared on BBC TV shows like BBC One Breakfast and on Radio 4 commenting on the latest trends in tech. Graham has an honors degree in Computer Science and spends his spare time podcasting and blogging.