The Pinnacle Contact
The new cinema will move backward in time by moving forward.
The cinema of the future will not be a static artifact but a living entity, changing with each viewing, shaped by its own logic, the viewer’s unique path, and collective decision-making. No one watches the same movie twice.
If we map the trajectory of how films are made, from analog all the way through the digital revolution, and now AI, the practice remains largely the same: content for the editor to build the film. The trajectory has always been leading us toward this end in more resourceful and streamlined ways.
With AI, we can now eliminate the production and the shoot all together. Currently, an AI film can be constructed by a single filmmaker solely with machine heads of departments. It is assembled from divergent sources, organized and structured much the way a film set is structured, except now, the pieces are not going to cameras, they are being organized in folders from AI and then brought directly to the edit.
I call this the Story Brain and the Adaptive Cinema Engine. Both will require leagues more data for its input than a regular film would require. It will require as many neural pathways as possible to create as many associations and connections as possible to power the multitudes of a film. And instead of a single script, a script will now encapsulate an entire range of possibilities. The Adaptive Cinema Engine will train on its film like a datasets, much like machine learning trains data into LLMs.
Why a Formal System Is Needed
When a film is restricted to two or three curated variations, we can rely on manual curation. But if we want a film to:
Dynamically rearrange scenes
Generate bridging dialogue or imagery on the fly
Maintain consistent character arcs
And respond to audience feedback (real-time or aggregated)
We need the Adaptive Cinema Engine to function as an internal architecture that ensures all these variations hold together under the same creative vision, a system that fosters emergent cinematic experiences without degenerating into random chaos. This is where the film’s journey culminates into its ultimate fate; where moving forward in time meets itself at the very start of a pre-determined possibility. The Pinnacle Contact is where free will meets its destiny.
Because every single iteration of the movie is encapsulated in this range of the outcomes, it is accounted for in the Adaptive Cinema Engine.
Rather than having folders for: “Sound” “Music” “Script” “Character Design” as necessitated by analog, digital, and now AI cinema, we take it a step further into creating exponential possibilities, the Story Brain could just be called: outcomes.
Unlike a traditional screenplay, which is linear, the Story Brain is modular and semantic: it encodes relationships, constraints, and emotional beats in a structure that an AI can interpret and manipulate.
Algorithmically, it will unpack the screenplay mathematically to encapsulate every possible outcome. The artist now becomes an auditor, monitoring, steering, ensuring that their vision is respected.
Instead of One Film, Two Ways, we now have One Film, Many Ways. This also encapsulates stylistic aesthetic changes, whether we want to view it live action, stop motion, animated.
The entire process, like solving cryptography, can be done manually by hand, an AI movie with an Adaptive Cinema Engine can still be made analog by going out with a cast and crew and shooting with cameras multiple ways. Such a treasure hunt would be resource intensive and cumbersome to manage. AI does not rid us of the techniques of old, but eliminates redundancy allowing for cinema to take its next evolutionary form.
We should not see AI as destructive, but the old forms as preventative.
AI filmmaking must evolve as well; the director would no longer need to use AI to manually bring the algorithm every shot, sound effect and piece of music that it needs. By this point we are in the realm of the Automated Film, but we must rethink the villainous subtext I brought this notion across volume 1 of The New Machine Cinema.
We must really consider the Automated Film as a necessary means to achieve the Adaptive Cinema Engine. A film will be constructed algorithmically with the full knowledge of audience preferences, having all the collective data at its disposal.
The Adaptive Cinema Engine will in effect, be the work of art, not the final iterations of artistic output; just as the camera represents the artform of cinema, the Adaptive Cinema Engine represents the artform of AI cinema.
The filmmaker, and the idea of the auteur, then, evolves to one of management and curation.
Now we already see this to an extent. Algorithms understand films primarily through genre. Filmmakers learn quickly how to address genre beats, or else audiences become disappointed. The filmmaker in that case is working through constraints—not entirely through their own creative free will. They are not building genres from scratch but operating in existing storytelling traditions. This is in a very basic way, already representing the Pinnacle Contact, but in a more primitive form: where the filmmaker’s free will meets the pre-determined expectations of the genre, creating one single outcome in a broader, metaphysical Jungian sense of archetypes, symbology and meaning.
In order to accept the premise of the Adaptive Cinema Engine, we must accept that cinema is automated already, except not in a literal sense.
In listing out associations with outcomes, we are not seeing cinema, we are seeing formulas happen inside the Adaptive Cinematic Engine. This requires AI because it must be enforced so the film does remains within the rails.
Every film will have guardrails enforcing its directive and curation, ensuring the film remains within its probabilistic bounds.
We may watch a film many times to get to that rare, one-in-a-million version. There is still an artist in this scenario, there is still an art. But rather than an artist placing down finite, concrete story, the artist will now exist as the author of a spectrum of experiences.
Encoding & “Training”
Drawing parallels from large language model training, the Story Brain is like the training set for an AI cinematic system. Instead of text or images alone, it is feeding the engine all the narrative logic, style references, and continuity rules. The AI “absorbs” these relationships, effectively learning the entire dataset of a film’s ultimate culmination. As the film plays out, possibilities narrow, until the Pinnacle Contact.
In an adaptive AI context, collisions happen continuously as the system decides the next best shot or sequence from the Story Brain’s modules. We can formalize this into steps:
Current Narrative State
The engine tracks “where we are” in the story.
Candidate Scenes / Shots
The system fetches a cluster of “modules” that the Story Brain deems thematically or narratively valid at this juncture.
Scoring / Collision
Each candidate is scored by how well it complements or contrasts the current mood.
Gating & Style Checks (“AI Police”)
A gating layer ensures we don’t break continuity.
Execution & Update
The chosen module plays or is generated.
By repeating this loop, the film orchestrates shot-by-shot or scene-by-scene collisions that produce emergent meaning while staying faithful to the overarching Story Brain.
Preventing Narrative Chaos
One fear: if every viewing can diverge too much, do we lose the film’s identity? The Story Brain addresses this by specifying which arcs or reveals are mandatory for the story to remain coherent. No matter how the engine jumps around or shortens scenes, it must deliver these beats. So viewers get different routes but the same essential emotional payoff.
We can in theory exit this Story Bible and enter into another one with entirely different story beats. But then we are moving into new kinds of abstraction. The further we are removed from the probabilistic chain, the less coherent it extends beyond the Story Brain.
You will be able to push further, but you won’t want to, besides novelty at first; people may watch films to just revel in how bizarre and surreal they become.
The Sliding Scale of Variation
Imagine this in practice, with a thriller show like 24, about an anti-terrorist organization that takes place in real time across 24 hours, who must stop an imminent terror threat. The Adaptive Cinema Engine will encapsulate all outcomes in these 24 hours.
Perhaps this will always lead to a countdown until everything went wrong in thrilling, spectacular fashion. Perhaps it will just, forever, give us the most thrilling 24 hours possible.
Somewhere, a sole viewer might claim to have the best 24 hours. These are compared, assembled, voted on, studied. The more powerful the Adaptive Cinema Engine is, the more unexpected culmination of the Pinnacle Contact.
Through algorithmic quantity, we now have the consensus, the best version outright; but there are so many options to consider beyond best.
Though optional, a truly advanced system might factor real-time or aggregate feedback. One of the benefits streaming companies found in the sheer quantity of data is they can monitor viewing habits en masse, learning exactly what causes people to click ‘next’, to binge watch a show, or exactly what show fails, why, and where.
The film’s Adaptive Cinema Engine will require audience feedback. Initially, as I wrote about in The Future Audience will be Machines, it might even be the audience itself. Because the Adaptive Cinema Engine holds mass data of audience feedback, the audience itself can be simulated with great accuracy.
Real-Time Physiological Cues
If the watch-tracker detects boredom across a large enough subset of the audience to pass the tipping point of interest, the engine can skip a slow scene or switch to a comedic beat.
If tension is too high for too long, it might insert a calming interlude.
Over time, the system sees that 80% of viewers drop off at Scene X. The AI retools the sequence—shortening it, rearranging the order, or adding a more compelling lead-in from the bible.
This can become cyclical: each new wave of viewer data “trains” future permutations, so the film evolves—like a permanent open beta. The key is that by the time a regular audience member sits down to view the film, the AI has accounted for every path in the probabilistic chain.
Imagine a Shakespeare play with a great cast. Every show is different. Every show is great. All that is needed, with this quantum idea of Shakespeare writing the same play numerous times in numerous ways, is an Adaptive Cinema Engine. Perfection becomes the easy part!
Who Would Watch These?
One should only look toward fandoms such as Star Wars in the modern day; where audiences do not stop at just the film. They want the entire canon; the novels, the videogames, the toys.
They want to experience the film in every dimension in every way, with every one of their senses, as if they are walking through a library. This connects to cinema as a three dimensional mental architecture, as studied in my essay, Post-Aesthetic Cinema.
Several distinct audience segments would emerge:
The Completionists: Viewers who approach these films like treasure hunters, watching repeatedly to discover rare sequences or combinations. Similar to how gamers pursue hidden endings or Easter eggs in videogames, these viewers would compare notes, document variations, and celebrate discovering particularly rare permutations—perhaps even those the director never anticipated.
The Analysts: Critics, scholars, and devoted cinephiles who would approach these films as systems rather than stories. They would study the Adaptive Cinema Engine itself when available, reverse-engineer the probabilistic decision trees, and map the full spectrum of possible experiences. Their discussions would focus less on specific scenes and more on the effectiveness of the overall system.
The Experientialists: Viewers who embrace the ephemeral, one-time-only nature of each viewing. Rather than chasing completeness, they value the unique, personal connection formed with their specific version. The knowledge that their experience cannot be exactly replicated becomes part of the appeal—cinema as unrepeatable moment rather than fixed artifact.
The Traditionalists: Not as one would expect, the traditionalist is not looking for the classic form. Rather, the traditionalist is attached to the one perfect cut they deem as canonical, passionately arguing this is the only one that matters.
AI systems themselves: as suggested in The Future Audience Will Be Machines, the ultimate viewers might be algorithmic systems that analyze, appreciate, and refine these living, breathing films, creating a feedback loop where machines optimize cinema for other machines. Can an AI even surprise itself?
The Fans: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Star Wars fandoms, the Warhammer, can now exist perpetually in their universe, wandering through a physical architecture of fandom.
The algorithms will have subscriptions, add-ons, upgrades for new issues. They may find a way to bridge these Story Brains into strings of interconnected, perhaps never-ending experiences.
It may happen under artist rule, under algorithmic rule, under corporate rule, or a blackhat pirate underground.
One may utilize the Adaptive Cinema Engine for their own purposes, let’s say to build a series of films around an existing comic book series, for instance, starting on Spider-Man 1, and then walking all the way to today.
In theory, you could have decades upon decades of developments, and each 60 year outcome from Spider-Man 1 up to today, would represent its own Pinnacle Contact.
Maybe the Pinnacle Contact would necessitate the same event to happen across all different versions. The fans might find an obsessive pursuit to find that one different outcome, mirroring the quantum plot lines in the Avengers: Endgame saga to avert that one single unavoidable event.
The success of the Adaptive Cinema Engine would depend largely on whether these audience segments find sufficient value in the experience to outweigh the loss of shared communal viewing. But this precedent exists already in video games. I also point toward competitive sports where we never know the outcome.
Making one wonder, what if two Adaptive Cinema Engines competed? It is a cinema cross-over event, a sport, a technology facing off. These two matrices have become the most popular architectural algorithms in entertainment. Now, a one time event, both super computers will face off, the algorithms themselves do not know what will happen. It is the entertainment event of the year, and they have sent the bests of our myths.
While this is too abstract to understand precisely, in attempting to conceive of where this leads, we must entertain even the unknowable.
No One Watches the Same Film Twice
In the long term, critics and scholars must discuss not “the film” but “the film’s Story Brain” and the diverse emergent experiences it spawns.
Consider the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Each screening is a participatory, ritualistic event where audiences wear costumes, shout callbacks, and re-enact scenes. In much the same way, an Adaptive Cinematic Engine governed by a Story Brain would render every viewing a unique and interactive experience.
Just as Rocky Horror became a living text with a fixed outcome, but reinterpreted through collective participation, our Adaptive Cinema Engine envisions a living outcome, more akin to a live experience, a rock-and-roll show, or a sporting event.
This not only cements the idea that no one watches the same film twice but also highlights how cinema can morph into a cultural ritual, merging a fixed experience with a communal experience in real time.
By giving the AI a richly defined blueprint, we solve the biggest threat to multi-form cinema—randomness—replacing it with a structured grammar that ensures every collision of images, every new scene, resonates with the film’s central themes.
In doing so, we stand on the threshold of a new cinematic grammar. One that refuses finality, thrives on constant renewal, and in the process, elevates the role of an overarching blueprint—the Adaptive Cinema Engine, the Story Brain and the Pinnacle Contact—as the real “script.” If that vision becomes standard practice, then truly, no one watches the same film twice. The Pinnacle Contact will mirror broader theories of metaphysical reality such as Neoplatonism, where ones free will meets their ultimate destiny, moving backward in time by moving forward.
