By Andrew Blackman

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Twenty years ago, the must-have entertainment accessory was the iPod, and Netflix customers had to wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail. Smartphones and streaming have since revolutionized home entertainment, while clouding the future of movie theaters and leading to the virtual extinction of the physical video-rental shops that used to be a staple of American towns.

What kinds of disruptive changes will the next two decades bring? We asked five entertainment experts to predict one big change we'll see in their field.

Hollywood movies you can make at home

Today, there is a massive difference between the production quality of the videos we shoot at home and the blockbusters we watch at the movies. In 20 years, however, new technological developments will continue to narrow that gap and make high-quality movie production accessible to everyone.

"Film schools are already starting to offer virtual-production programs, " says Paul Warner, a film director and senior instructor at the New York Film Academy. "The thing that's incredible with the virtual studio is you can do it at home. You don't have to shoot on location, so it's much cheaper."

Warner sees virtual-production technology becoming much cheaper and more powerful over the next two decades. When shooting an action movie, for example, there will be no need for a separate postproduction process. Instead, the director will see all the visual effects like fires and explosions projected on a high-quality LED screen behind the actors and can shoot a realistic scene right there, changing the effects as needed.

Meanwhile, generative AI will allow filmmakers to generate realistic background scenes like crowds and battles, instead of shooting on location and using hundreds of extras. Warner worries that this will cause job losses in the movie industry, but he says it will also create opportunities for independent filmmakers to shoot movies that would need large studio budgets today.

AI test audiences

The traditional model of entertainment has been for creators to produce a movie, show or song, and then present it to audiences, where it becomes either a hit or a flop. Use of artificial intelligence will overturn that model in the next 20 years, making the production process into more of a collaboration between creator and audience. Or at least an AI audience.

"The boundary between creator and consumer will largely dissolve in the next 20 years," says Stephanie Dolan, U.S. entertainment leader at Deloitte. "Not having to wait until a movie is shot, edited and viewed to understand consumer preferences for plot or archetypes or character development, but to be able to use predictive real-time data to make those types of decisions, I think would be really powerful in having fans help creators tell the stories that fans want to hear."

Instead of gathering people in a room to give feedback on a work in progress, for example, creators could use AI personas to test how their movie or TV show will play with different audiences. The AI will be trained on masses of detailed historical data about how people responded to previous productions, analyzing where they lost interest or started to multitask, and will be able to predict the reaction to a new movie. Directors can then make changes as they go, quickly testing different ideas and getting instant feedback. They could even create different endings for different kinds of fan: a happy ending for the romantics and a tear-jerker for those who appreciate a good tragedy.

AI companions in videogames

When Jesse Schell thinks about the future of videogames, he sees one major change coming: "It's all about AI companions." He predicts a future in which AI companions become consistent characters across different games -- and across decades.

"AI companions are going to change the way that we play games -- not only the way we interact with in-game characters but also the way we interact with each other in games," says Schell, videogame designer and distinguished professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University. "They're going to be outside of the games as well, in our regular lives, and they're going to be part of play and education."

Schell sees people keeping their AI companions throughout their lives, just as people today often still use the online handles they created as teenagers in the 1990s. These companions will remember games we won and characters we defeated years ago, drawing on a wealth of shared experiences that will deepen the gaming experience, Schell says.

Virtual and augmented reality will also bring a new level of realism, allowing gamers to feel as if their AI companion is right there with them, and advances in robotics could even allow people to create physical versions of AI companions.

"It's one thing to talk about a companion in a traditional screen-based videogame," Schell says. "It's another thing to have a companion who's right there with you, where you can make eye contact and have a verbal conversation. I think that will start to be a very normal way to interact with these characters."

Live will thrive

Future Americans will probably spend even more time on digital devices than they do now, but it will not be the death knell of live entertainment. In fact, it could spur a resurgence in everything from theater and opera to ballet and concerts, as people start to crave human connection and shared in-person experiences to balance out screen time and atomized forms of entertainment.

"The experience of being together with other humans who are doing something extraordinary -- whether that's the most incredible soprano or Yo-Yo Ma on the cello or Taylor Swift lighting up the stage -- those are seminal experiences," says Mariko Silver, president and CEO of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. "Humans are wired for connection."

While some forms of live entertainment, such as opera and classical music, have remained largely unchanged for centuries, Silver sees venues trying harder to reach audiences that are more used to online entertainment. Some performances will encourage audience participation, perhaps including technology -- for example, audiences logging instant responses to works and voting for what they want to hear or see next.

Live entertainment -- with a tech twist

Mike Bechtel also sees live entertainment blossoming in 20 years, but with technology at the heart of it. "Any entertainment experience worth having is going to be a hybrid of spatial and digital," says Bechtel, futurist and professor of corporate innovation at the University of Notre Dame. "It's going to be the best of both."

The entertainment venues of the future will feature wraparound video screens, perfect audio and the ability to create physical experiences like wind and rain, he says. Venues like the Las Vegas Sphere are already offering something similar, and 20 years of development will make digital experiences so realistic that audiences can't differentiate them from physical reality.

Virtual and augmented reality will also be a key part of live entertainment, Bechtel says, allowing individual audience members to experience different versions of the same show. Today's clunky VR headsets will be replaced by unobtrusive devices, perhaps embedded in contact lenses or even brain-computer interfaces. They could allow individual audience members to customize a movie, for example, by skipping scenes they don't like, changing the audio or even choosing separate plot paths.

"It's like those old 'choose your own adventure' books," Bechtel says. "I'm choosing my own adventure scene by scene." With brain-computer interfaces, we could think about what we want to happen next, or the movie could adapt based on physical signals: "Maybe you don't know what you want to have happen next, but your heart rate and autonomic nervous system suggest you're a little too wound up. So we're going to spare you the terror scene and move you right to the happy ending."

Audiences of the future will still talk about the movie as they leave the theater, but instead of discussing what they thought of the ending, they'll be talking about which ending they chose.

"In 25 years, we won't watch entertainment," Bechtel says. "We'll enter it. We'll be part of it."

Andrew Blackman is a writer in Serbia. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 11, 2026 12:38 ET (16:38 GMT)

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