“My world is coming, and it’s going to destroy yours,” warns
a red-lit Jared Leto in Tron: Ares, a film where a rogue digital
intelligence threatens to overtake reality.
It’s the kind of premise that should feel perfectly timed.
Just months ago, top AI experts released a chilling manifesto titled AI 2027,
predicting humanity could lose control of artificial intelligence within a
decade. “We’re two years away from something we might not be able to contain,”
cautioned MIT professor Max Tegmark. And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
recently warned that both open and closed AI systems “can be hacked for harmful
purposes including killing people.”
Yet despite these real-world anxieties, most audiences
skipped Tron: Ares and its dystopian warning. The movie limped through
its opening weekend, joining M3GAN 2.0 and Mission: Impossible – Dead
Reckoning both of which also featured AI villains in the box office’s
digital graveyard.
Each of these films had its own hurdles, but it’s becoming
clear that the “evil AI” trope has lost its charge. Ironically, this fatigue
comes just as real AI poses its most credible threat yet.
Part of the problem is familiarity. From HAL 9000’s
unblinking red eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to the replicants of Blade
Runner and the seductive menace of Ex Machina, Hollywood has been
exploring AI paranoia for decades. These stories once felt prophetic. Now, they
feel… nostalgic.
Then came ChatGPT friendly, accessible, and eerily competent
and the cultural mood shifted. Today, people might worry about AI replacing
jobs or spreading misinformation, but they also rely on it to plan vacations,
draft emails, and recommend moisturizers. It’s hard to fear what’s also helping
you decide how to word a breakup text.
AI was scarier when it was theoretical. So when Mission:
Impossible warns, “The Entity has become sentient… and we’re powerless to
stop it,” audiences shrug because that same “entity” might be helping them
write their kid’s science fair project.
Cinematically, AI also poses a creative problem. Movies need
tangible villains something to see, fear, and confront. But AI, by nature, is
abstract. Turn it into a glowing screen (Dead Reckoning), a robot (M3GAN
2.0), or a digital god (Tron: Ares), and it risks feeling either
derivative or cartoonish.
Compare that to nuclear weapons still the ultimate
existential threat and a reliable cinematic terror. From The Terminator
to Chernobyl, Hollywood has kept the world vividly afraid of nukes. They
explode; they horrify; they don’t help you file your taxes.
AI, on the other hand, now lives in our pockets and browsers. It’s too familiar, too useful, and too mundane to be terrifying. So when Tom Cruise grimly warns of an all-powerful AI in Mission: Impossible, it lands less like a doomsday prophecy and more like someone shouting at their Roomba.
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