The film industry is headed for a moment of massive change, and this was perfectly demonstrated to me at the 2025 Replay AI Film Festival in Venice last week. The ten short films created by the 2025 finalists here showed a tantalizing glimpse of what will soon be possible, thanks to AI.
The impact of AI won’t just be about what we can see on the screen. At the round table before the winners were announced, the talk was of movie budgets that were 10 or 20 times smaller than today’s, but producing films of equal quality. This could totally change the landscape of filmmaking, perhaps even lowering the financial barrier for entry and democratizing moviemaking in the process.
As Filippo Rizzante, CTO of Reply, said, “This edition of the Reply AI Film Festival confirms how artificial intelligence, when used consciously, can become a true ally of creativity. The award-winning short films show that technology does not replace artistic sensitivity, but rather amplifies it, offering young talents new opportunities to experiment with languages, emotions, and innovative visions.”
The benefits of AI for movie studios are obviously commercial – cheaper productions mean bigger profits – but for the directors, it means the ability to go from making one movie in three years to making three, or more, movies in one year, which is liberating compared to the Jurassic speeds of current movie production.
“Now we don’t have to wait months before creating some images that we had in our minds, and that is incredible”, said Jacopo Reale, the winner of this year’s Replay AI Film Festival. Every scene of his short film Love at First Sight was made with Kling 2.0. In fact, the whole thing took him just eight days to complete. Watch it here:
You can view Love at First Sight on the Replay website, along with the second and third place winners and the winners of two special awards, Instinct by Marcello Costa Jr., which won the Lexus Visionary Award, and Clown by Shanshan Jiang, which won the AI for Good award.
What is an AI film?
The very question of what an AI film is seems to be constantly debated. All the films in the festival were short, around the five or six-minute mark, but employed a variety of approaches. Some were a mix of live action with AI additions, while others were entirely made in AI. In fact, the very notion of the role AI should play in film was a frequently occurring topic in the films produced by the finalists.
“Winning with Love at First Sight is not only a great honor, but also a push to keep exploring the visual and especially narrative possibilities that AI opens up”, said winner Jacopo Reale.
“The film is all about the act of observation: who imagines whom, and how emotions can arise from an illusion. AI makes me distill stories to their essence, giving rhythm and meaning to images that don’t exist in a traditional sense, yet can still evoke deep emotions.”
One of the most interesting finalists I talked to was writer and director of Meme Myself and AI, Chris Boyle, who was quite brazen in his approach to what an AI film should be: “I am uninterested in recreating reality using AI”, he said. “I think we should be doing something different.”
You can see for yourself how his reality-warping approach to storytelling is only possible using AI:
The technology to make a full, feature-length, AI movie featuring animation is already here. Animation doesn’t have that high bar of realism to reach that live action film demands, so it’s the perfect medium for AI. In fact, ChatGPT makers OpenAI just announced that they’re providing the tools for a $30 million, fully AI-created animated feature film called Critterz that is expected to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026.
But when it comes to making a feature-length AI action movie, or comedy, in which the actors look like real people and where the movie is indistinguishable from a ‘real’ movie, we are not quite there yet.
As inspiring and as well-made as Love at First Sight is, I can tell that the actors are AI-generated, and that drops me out of the suspension of disbelief that great movies employ when they transport you to the land of cinema. But it won’t always be this way.
I asked everybody I talked to at the Replay Film Festival the big question: “How long before we get AI movies that look 100% real?” Various people from the judging panel, including Rob Minkoff, the director of the original 1994 animated Lion King, gave me different answers from just one year to two years to three.
“In terms of the quality of the filmmaking and the films and the AI production itself”, said Minkoff, “I think there’s been a huge leap forward from last year. Last year, the films were very impressive, but I would say that this year it’s much, much, much closer to being possible to create a film with AI that would be appropriate for long-form storytelling. I would say [that will be possible in] maybe one more year.”
“Creating long-form storytelling is challenging because of the need for consistency of characters, consistency of worlds, and it is very, very challenging to control AI, but as those tools become more fluid, I think we’ll see more and more impact.”
AI film stars
Talking to the winner, Jacopo Reale, he told me that for him, it was the speed at which AI could turn the images in his head into a real movie that was the real benefit of AI.
Already a filmmaker used to traditional methods, AI has become a tool that almost allows him to imagine a film in real time, compared to the speed of the traditional filmmaking process.
“The impact of AI is completely positive because it is changing a lot of the workflow. For me, the most important part is that in traditional movie-making, you have to wait months from the initial idea to filming. With AI, this process is condensed down to a few short weeks or days. You can immediately start to create images that you can use in editing. This is a great change.”
“I think there will be two different paths for the movie industry. One is the traditional way with the camera, with AI that can give some contribution to the film, and the other way is movies made without a camera, totally AI-generated.”
But whether it takes a year, two years, or three before we get there, you can be sure that the future of film is about to change. At some point in the near future, we will have a live-action film that is largely AI-generated. Instead of having hundreds or thousands of people working on it, it will be made by a relatively small team that never even steps onto a movie set at all, and it will be finished in a fraction of the time and budget that a feature film would normally take today.
Everybody I talked to at the film festival seemed convinced that human writers would still be important, but every other job, including that of actors, seemed to be in doubt in the future. It remains to be seen if audiences would pay to see an AI-generated leading man or woman, because while AI can replace most of the roles on a film set, there’s still one role it can’t replace – and that’s the audience.
