Nikola Todorovic has heard all the panic. He’s scrolled through the Instagram reels of AI-generated shots, read the think pieces predicting cinema’s imminent extinction, and sat through more than a few conference panels at the Cannes Film Market where the word “disruption” was wielded like a cudgel. He gets it. He also thinks most of the conversation is completely missing the point.
The Bosnia-born co-founder, of Wonder Dynamics, now an Autodesk company, has spent a decade trying to build something more precise than the blunt instrument the industry argues about: AI tools designed to reduce the technical drudgery of visual effects production without pulling the human artist out of the equation. His pitch at Cannes this week is the same one he’s been making since 2016. “We were really focused on how do we make AI that coexist with the existing pipeline,” he says.
It is, in its way, the defining argument of the 79th Cannes Film Festival — one that has run as a persistent undercurrent beneath the red-carpet premieres and the Palme d’Or competition. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape the film industry. That debate, to many here, already feels settled. The more urgent and thornier question is which version of AI Hollywood is actually talking about — and whether the industry has the sophistication, or the will, to tell the difference.
