What Secret Invasion and Late Night with the Devil Taught Hollywood About AI
Two of the highest-profile AI backlashes in recent film and TV history hit within a year of each other. Only one of them cost the production anything measurable in scores.
Both of them, together with a new union contract nobody outside the trades paid much attention to, reshaped how productions handle AI going forward.
Secret Invasion’s AI-Generated Title Sequence Controversy
Something felt off about the Secret Invasion opening credits from the first watch. Shape-shifting Skrull faces melted into each other in a way that looked painterly and a little uncanny at once.
Director Ali Selim confirmed to Polygon why. The production had used AI to generate it, reaching out to AI vendors and feeding them themes and imagery. The software generated variations from there, and the team refined what came back.
Fans reacted within hours, and so did the people whose jobs the AI shortcut threatened. Storyboard illustrators and animators called it a direct insult, arriving as it did during an active WGA strike over AI protections. One of them wrote that it felt like “salt in the wounds” of everyone still on the picket line, and the backlash spread fast from there.
How Bad the Scores Gotć
Right now Rotten Tomatoes has it at 53% with critics, 43% with audiences. That is the lowest ever of any Disney+ series in MCU history. Before Secret Invasion, no Marvel Studios project in 15 years had been rated “Rotten” by critics and audiences at once.
Plotting problems didn’t help. Pacing didn’t help, and neither did the killing off a fan-favorite character in the premiere. Still, the AI opening became a recurring talking point in nearly every piece of coverage explaining why the show underperformed against Marvel’s usual baseline.
Marvel’s AI problem didn’t stop there. Fans spotted warped hands and copy-pasted crowd faces in Fantastic Four: First Steps promotional posters in February 2025, and called out the same use of AI all over again.
A Second Backlash, But No Score Damage
Less than a year after Secret Invasion, Late Night with the Devil hit theaters with three AI-generated interstitial images used as retro TV bumpers. Directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes confirmed the use of AI to Variety.
The reaction on social media echoed the Secret Invasion controversy almost beat for beat. There were calls for a boycott, accusations that the choice undercut working artists, and comparisons to the ongoing strike-era AI fights.
The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score never moved, though. It held at 97% through the entire controversy, with an 87% audience score, and went on to post the best opening weekend in IFC Films’ history. Mike Flanagan and Stephen King both publicly defended it.
Scores, side by side:
| Title | Critics | Audience | Rotten Tomatoes Status |
| Secret Invasion | 53% | 43% | “Rotten” by both measures |
| Late Night with the Devil | 97% | 87% | “Fresh” throughout the controversy |
| Fantastic Four: First Steps | No core damage tracked yet | No score damage tracked yet | Second Marvel AI backlash in under two years |
Same category of controversy. Wildly different outcomes.
Why One Backlash Stuck and the Other Didn’t
The backlash against Late Night with the Devil was real and loud. The box office and the review aggregates simply didn’t reflect it. That contrast matters. The reputational risk from visible AI use in a finished production isn’t really about the technology itself.
Secret Invasion had other well-documented problems dragging its score down before the AI conversation even started. Late Night with the Devil had none of those problems. Audiences got a few seconds of AI-generated title cards inside a film they otherwise loved, and chose not to hold it against the film.
So where did the real reversal happen? Neither production has a confirmed follow-up that would let anyone track a clean before-and-after on how its specific team sources AI work now. What did change, industry-wide, is the leverage behind the decision to hand that work to named vendors.
In-house prompting used to be the default: cheap, fast, and handled by whoever on the team had access to the right tools. That default is what both backlashes put under a spotlight.
The Union Contract Nobody Outside the Trades Noticed
IATSE’s 2024 Basic Agreement with the AMPTP, ratified by more than 85% of voting members, includes a specific protection. No union member can be forced to enter prompts into an AI system in a way that displaces another member’s job.
That single clause changes the calculation for any production weighing an AI shortcut. Prompting the work in-house now carries a real contractual liability, whereas outsourcing to an external vendor doesn’t automatically trigger the same liability.
A named agency, accountable for its own labor practices and deliverables, becomes the lower-risk option by default once that clause is in place.
The Legal Mechanism Behind the Apparent Reversal
This is the real mechanism behind what looks, from the outside, like productions “moving back” to agencies after a public AI controversy. It’s less a creative reversal and more a legal one.
The contract signed a year after Secret Invasion’s title sequence made headlines gives studios and showrunners a concrete reason to route AI work through a vetted, named partner instead of an in-house shortcut.
For studios and independent productions alike, the practical lesson isn’t “never use AI.” Late Night with the Devil proves that audiences can shrug off limited, disclosed AI use in service of a genuinely good film.
The lesson is more specific than that. Know exactly who did the work. Be ready to name them. Make sure the answer to “who is this?” isn’t a shrug.
Finding a Named Partner Instead of a Prompt
Production companies vetting partners for AI-assisted work now have more incentive than ever to work with established, accountable studios rather than ad hoc prompting handled by whoever’s available.
Comparing vendors with a real track record matters both creatively and contractually in a post-IATSE-contract industry, and DesignRush’s directory of AI development companies is one place to start that search.
Secret Invasion showed what happens when the AI question overshadows everything else about a production. Late Night with the Devil showed that a strong enough film can absorb the same controversy. The Fantastic Four posters showed the industry hasn’t fully learned the lesson yet.
The difference between a footnote and a headline usually comes down to who’s willing to put their name on the work.
