Give it another year, and this sort of project will materialize directly through video AI nonsense. There won’t be a years-long journey from excited fanfiction to artistic involvement to corporate interest to maybe becoming a real thing. The original cluster of obsessives will do it themselves.

Idiot executives think generative networks mean they can type in a premise and extrude entertainment product. (They probably can, but if that’s the case, so can you. Try selling ice to someone with a fridge.) What’s going to transform the industry is scribbling a rectangle onto a landscape photo, saying “this is a Roman legion,” and having it be so. The word “transform” might be overly polite. For example, a forest is transformed by fire. We’re looking at a very near future where you can MS Paint a helmet onto a dude and have it become as photorealistic as any costume. And doing it on one frame carries across the entire shot.

It’s gonna get weird.