I spent some time last month with a relative in the industry (camera operator and producer) and he already uses some very sophisticated AI to map out scenes and shots in gen ai full video before they shoot IRL. It's mostly a cost saving exercise as well as occasionally helping to improve the quality of the deliverable.
He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design.
He knows that many different disciplines he works with will all compete for that prompting work and there obviously won't be enough work for everybody to go around.
The first part of this is using human actors in front of 360 video stages like The Volume [0] to display the sets (which was pioneered by The Mandalorian) and then ultimately the actors themselves will be AI rendered.
And at this point it doesn't matter where this is filmed.
I grew up close by to Pinewood Studios 30+years ago - I can't imagine them putting a lot more investment and development into that lot given where this is all going.
Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology.
Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is setting sales records.
If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable.
This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar.
If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.