Shazam star Zachary Levi is warning that advanced artificial intelligence is going to be a disaster for Hollywood’s human workforce as the studios move to replace human beings with AI.
Talking to Axios at the 2026 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival taking place in Austin, Texas, this week, the Chuck star said that all businesses, not just entertainment, will soon be deciding whether to replace human employees with AI.
“Everyone will have to come to a point in whatever business you run, if you employ human beings, you are going to have to ask yourself, ‘it’s a new shiny thing, I could replace X amount of my workforce, or not.’ And we need to be conscious of that,” Levi said on the stage.
But he feels the decisions will go badly for human employees in Hollywood.
“And, unfortunately, I think in Hollywood, the ramifications are going to be dire,” he said.
By some estimates, thousands of people in the entertainment industry have already lost their jobs to AI.
Last year Coby Mendoza estimated that Hollywood had already replaced a whopping 200,000 human employees with AI. And that is just the start.
In addition, Axios reported that streamers like Netflix, Peacock and Prime Video have gone full-speed-ahead with including AI in their productions and viewer experience and they are billing it as “infrastructure,” instead of a “replacement” for human employees and creators.
Meanwhile, Hollywood’s various unions are desperately trying to get ahead of the effects AI will have on their industry.
SAG-AFTRA has made AI a key issue in their negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that are now ongoing for the union’s next contract. And AI was a huge stumbling block during the Actors and Writers strikes in 2023.
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