Grok, Kling, Runway: AI Video’s Future Has Hollywood on the Outside Looking In
Post-Sora, the space is fragmenting into separate ecosystems — and studios and streamers aren’t in any of them
I cover Hollywood and AI. I wrote about the real reason OpenAI acquired TBPN, the sudden death of Sora, Val Kilmer’s AI-assisted posthumous movie role, Ben Affleck selling his AI company to Netflix and the entertainment industry’s meltdown over ByteDance’s Seedance.
For the past year, Hollywood has been full-on freaking out about text-to-video and what AI can and can’t do in storytelling. On Sunday, during an NAB Show panel I hosted for The Ankler — featuring Bryn Mooser (CEO of Asteria), Christina Lee Storm (head of studio at Secret Level) and Michael LoFaso (co-CEO of Dan Lin’s Rideback and Spuree) — I had the chance to ask these experts with huge investments in AI video creation whether “Hollywood is cooked.” (You’ll soon be able to watch this lively panel on The Ankler’s YouTube channel.) While we reached no consensus on the degree of Hollywood’s cooked-ness, we did go deep on a category of AI content that’s undergoing wild transformation.
Text-to-video seemed, for a moment this spring, like it was finally resolving into something the industry could make sense of. Sora, the product that had carried most of the category’s weight and most of its hype, was on its way out; OpenAI announced the shutdown on March 24, with the consumer app set to go dark this coming Sunday, April 26. Disney, which had struck a three-year character-licensing deal with OpenAI and was preparing to take a $1 billion stake in the company, walked away from both. The remaining players were sorting themselves into what looked like a pecking order for different needs: Grok out front with meme-creators and consumers, Runway in the middle for the professional class, Kling and Google’s Veo behind them with different audiences, and Sora’s orphaned users scattering into the rest.
And through all of this, there was a sense of creative schadenfreude, the glee of AI slop being defeated by “good” storytelling. Text-to-video was moribund, a depressing era to be forgotten.
It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong.
Text-to-video is not stabilizing as a product category. It’s diffusing into a set of features.
What briefly looked like a coherent market — platforms competing to define AI-generated video — has started to break apart. The underlying capability is being absorbed into three very different environments: social networks, creator workflows and professional production tools.
That shift matters because it changes the question. The issue is no longer which platform wins. It’s where the technology settles, and how differently it behaves once it’s embedded inside systems built for distribution, scale or control.
Among the players left, Grok accounts for the largest observed AI video tool traffic, according to Artificial Analysis, while Runway, Google’s Veo and Flow, and Kling all have significant minority shares, with the remainder fragmented across smaller platforms. These figures are imperfect proxies, not production audits, but they are consistent in one crucial respect: No single platform has achieved category dominance, and no unified market structure has formed around text-to-video at all.
That lack of consolidation may be the defining feature of how these tools get used going forward — not as a single industry, but as a handful of fractured ones, each serving a different master.
Today’s column looks at three of them: Grok, Kling and Runway. Not because they’re the only players left standing, but because each represents a different answer to the question Sora’s collapse left hanging — where does AI video actually live? Grok lives in the feed. Kling lives in the creator pipeline. Runway lives in the edit bay. And the distance between those three locations, far more than the quality of their outputs, is what Hollywood should be paying attention to.
Below, I break down:
Why Runway is the only tool here making real inroads into Hollywood’s edit bay
What legacy producers are up against when the competition isn’t just cheaper — it’s a different game entirely
What Grok is actually built for — and why Elon Musk’s “movies by 2027” rhetoric misses the point
How Kling is quietly industrializing short-form video, and the creator economy driving its rise
The incumbent each of these platforms is actually fighting
Why no single AI video winner is emerging — and why that’s worse for Hollywood
How three separate economies — feeds, creators and studios — are pulling video in incompatible directions