Tommy Harper

Producer

Producer on Top Gun: Maverick and Wednesday who thinks the microseries format is about to break through, and that AI will not carry it. His line at the 2026 Vertical Media Summit: you can generate anything, but without human emotion nobody watches.

Producer Entertainment Microdrama

Why this score

How the formula works →

+1.3anti1 anti-AI statement (measured)
±0nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view

Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Leaning Anti-AI · 1.3/10

Biography

Tommy Harper is an American film and television producer whose credits include Top Gun: Maverick and the Netflix series Wednesday. In 2026 he turned up in an unlikely room: Owl & Co.’s inaugural Vertical Media Summit, where Hollywood producers, platform executives, and investors gathered to work out what the microdrama business is becoming.

Anything is not the same as something

Harper argued that the format — increasingly rebranded as microseries — would have its mainstream moment within the year, carried there by a social-media star or a brand rather than by technology. Asked about AI production, which several platforms at the summit were embracing, he drew the line where most working producers draw it.

You can make anything you want in AI. If you don’t have the human emotion, you don’t feel it. Nobody’s going to watch it, so you have to have a good story that starts with that.

— TheWrap, 2026

He also noted that Hollywood’s tolerance for AI-generated performance remains low, and questioned whether audiences will accept generated scenes that demand complicated acting. He said it in the same session where Joey Jia of ReelShort admitted a pure businessman would drop live-action, and where Bogdan Nesvit reported that AI series were matching live-action on retention — the empirical claim Harper’s position has to survive.