I’ve been hearing that compositing is dead for as long as I’ve been doing it. Not changing, not consolidating, not under pressure...dead. I first heard it when I started working in Canada, and I’ve heard it every few years since, usually from people who have already disengaged and are now narrating that disengagement as foresight.

What’s strange is that this pessimism has coexisted, year after year, with films shipping, studios hiring, billions in box office revenue, and when theatrical was supposedly finished, an explosion of streaming platforms that increased content demand rather than erased it.

The industry didn’t die. It reconfigured. But reconfiguration is slow and unsatisfying to explain, so people reach for death instead. Pessimism just sounds smarter.

This isn’t a denial of layoffs, visa stress, or exhaustion, it’s a refusal to confuse real pain with a final verdict on the medium itself.

AI has simply given that same instinct a new vocabulary. The argument now is that no one will watch movies anymore, that everything will be generated, that learning comp is pointless because prompts will replace craft.

I think about this the same way I think about sports. Some people don’t like sports at all. They won’t go to games, they won’t subscribe to ESPN, they won’t watch a match even if it’s everywhere. No improvement in technology will convert them, because they were never the audience.

AI-generated content will have an audience, and already does, but it’s not the same group of people who happily pay $10–$20 to sit quietly and watch a well-made film. Different appetite. Different expectations.

There will always be a market for stories shaped with intent, taste, and human judgment layered over tools. That market may be smaller and denser, with higher expectations per person, but it doesn’t disappear just because image generation gets cheaper.

What actually changes is selectivity: fewer people doing the work, less tolerance for vague competence, and far more pressure on clarity and judgment. That only feels like death if you were relying on scale rather than depth.

If you’re pessimistic about VFX, that’s a valid personal response. You’re allowed to leave. But the industry doesn’t pause to validate that choice, and it doesn’t wait for consensus before moving on. It never has.

Compositing isn’t dead. It’s changed. It’s metabolized new tools, new constraints, and new expectations the same way it always has. The work now asks more of you, more range, more judgment, more literacy across disciplines because the problems are no longer isolated.

For reasons I’ve never fully understood, people are drawn to declaring the end. It sounds smarter than sitting with change. But this isn’t an ending. The craft doesn’t disappear here, it tightens, asking more judgment, more range, and more care from the people who remain.