Tomorrow Tuesday — July 2026 (Issue #1)
Welcome to the first issue of Tomorrow Tuesday, where we cover the revolution running through film, video games, music and the creative industries.
A newsletter by SOUTS, where we explore what happens when artificial intelligence stops being just a tool and starts changing the way we create and consume stories.
George Lucas Joined the AI Debate in Hollywood
This week a new face joined the debate about AI in film: none other than one of the figures who transformed modern commercial cinema, George Lucas. Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Ben Affleck and basically every person who considers themselves relevant in Hollywood (so, everyone) had already weighed in.
The creator of Star Wars defended the use of artificial intelligence in film. His argument isn’t new: if AI makes it easier to make movies, it’s worth using. He also pointed out that every new technology runs into resistance before it becomes a normal part of the craft.
“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies. It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
— George Lucas
The position carries a different weight coming from someone who always understood cinema as a technological medium: digital effects, CGI, virtual production. The most interesting part was how undiplomatic he was about it: AI is here to stay. Period.
On top of that there’s Netflix, which says it has used generative AI in roughly 300 titles so far in 2026.
My read: if you’re still stuck debating whether AI is going to be used in film or not, you’re a year late.
On one side we have AI getting into traditional filmmaking. On the other, traditional filmmaking getting into AI. Promise, an AI-native production studio, is partnering with traditional screenwriters to develop their projects. It’s a lovely signal: after a first stage dominated by visual novelty, the conversation is coming back to script, characters and direction.
Technology can lower the cost of producing an image. Taste is not up for negotiation.
What Does This Mean for Latin America?
Once we in Latin America wake up and start using AI to produce quality original stories (and not just crappy ads during the World Cup hydration break) we’re going to realize the opportunity is enormous.
For decades, a good chunk of Latin American cinema tried to produce inside a model that was never designed for us. The opportunity is not about imitating Hollywood, but cheaper.
The promise is a different one: smaller teams can take on more ambitious projects.
A regional production company can build capacity without investments on the scale of a major studio, and without every project depending entirely on public funding or a traditional co-production. Support isn’t the problem; dependence is.
The change is a mindset shift. If we set out to create our own stories with lighter structures and international reach, we can produce and validate local IP before landing the traditional financing that a huge production requires.
Stories Are Changing Shape Too
The transformation isn’t happening only inside the studios. It also shows up in much more interesting places.
WWE announced a collaboration with ReelShort to produce vertical microfiction starring its wrestlers. It’s a particularly clear combination of three trends: recognizable IP, serial storytelling and mobile-first consumption.
In parallel, Roblox introduced Build, a mobile-first tool that turns a text instruction into a basic game inside the app itself. Designing an interactive world is starting to look more and more like posting a video.
This changes the traditional path of an intellectual property. Before, an idea had to go through development, financing and production before meeting its audience. Now it can start as a character, a vertical short, an interactive prototype or a small community.
Before, the audience showed up at the end of the process. Now it seems to be a requirement for deciding which story deserves to grow, change or turn into a bigger production.
From Generating to Controlling
During the first GenAI boom, most tools competed over the same thing: generating the most impressive image from a prompt. Quality keeps improving, but the competition is starting to shift. Here are a few signals from this week.
Disney Research introduced a generative motion rig for Blender. The artist defines poses, trajectories and specific moments; the AI builds the motion between those decisions.
Google, for its part, released GNM, an open ecosystem of parametric human models. Its first version lets you separately control the identity, the expressions and the pose of a 3D head, including eyes, teeth and tongue.
At the same time, generative tools are moving inside professional software. Higgsfield already lets you generate and edit material directly in After Effects, while Magnific added generation, retouching and upscaling inside Illustrator.
The fourth signal comes from Decart. Lucy 2.5 transforms live video at 30 frames per second, keeps consistency between frames and reacts to the movements of the person in front of the camera. Video becomes an interactive medium that changes while it’s happening.
What does all of this tell us? What we artists have been asking for since 2022: more control.
Death to the prompt as a product; long live human control. Text is going to become one instruction inside a much more precise process.
Our Favorite Tools of the Week 😎
- Wan-Dancer-14B is now open source. It generates long dance videos from music, keeping the rhythm and a certain coherence across the sequence.
- Voicebox is an open source, local-first voice studio. It lets you clone your own voices, generate dialogue, dictate in any application and give a voice to AI agents.
- ScenA generates complete audio scenes with several reference voices. It can include overlapping dialogue, laughter, silences, acoustics and ambient sound within a single generation.
- CrossView for LTX-2.3 works like a second virtual camera: it takes a video and regenerates the scene from another angle. Still early, but promising.
- LingBot-World 2.0 generates interactive worlds that can go on indefinitely and respond to actions like attacking, shooting or casting spells. It also includes agents that control the characters and modify the environment.
- ARDY is NVIDIA’s new model for generating and directing 3D human motion in real time through text, trajectories, poses and other controls.
Whoever Generates the Most Content Won’t Win
All of this could be read as a race to produce more images, more videos and more stories in less time. That’s probably the least interesting interpretation.
Producing convincing images is going to get more and more accessible. The isolated image is going to lose value. Creating characters that resonate, worlds that have something to say and stories someone wants to follow is going to stay hard.
At SOUTSwe’re not interested in using these tools just to fill feeds. We’re interested in understanding how they can help us create our own stories, test them earlier, build communities around them and turn them into worlds that can grow.
Whoever generates the most content won’t win. Whoever turns these new capabilities into stories someone wants to follow will.
See you next Tomorrow Tuesday.
Yves
