I didn't like this Connie Willis novella nearly as much as Bellwether Partially I thought it tried a little too hard to play cute with the "Hollywood movie magic", and partly I got distracted by the technical details, which struck me as unrealistic. I also thought that the future society it presented was a little too simplistic.

In this future, all films are controlled by a few studios which constantly battle each other over copyrights, so they can remake old films with digital technology, inserting some past star into a movie they were never in originally, or removing references to alcohol, etc.

While that sort of thing no doubt will happen, it ignores so many other social trends, like micro-markets, the success of indie films, the ability of people to make great looking movies for relatively little money (Sky Captain is a great example), and so on. The future of film is really complex, and the idea of a world where nobody is making new films is difficult to believe in.