By late 2025, text‑to‑video and AI VFX tools have improved dramatically, but they still fall short of consistently matching something like Disney’s The Mandalorian in full production quality and reliability.

1. State of text‑to‑video around and after April 2025

   • OpenAI’s Sora and successors can produce highly photorealistic, cinematic short clips (tens of seconds up to about a minute), but reviewers and OpenAI’s own system card note ongoing problems with complex physics, causality, and fine details such as faces and crowded scenes. External assessments explicitly say it is impressive but not perfect and that it will be a long time before text‑to‑video threatens traditional filmmaking. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Runway’s Gen‑4 model (released March 2025) generates only 5–10‑second clips at 720p and is documented to suffer from motion artifacts, physics issues, and character inconsistency across separately generated clips. Reviews and Runway’s own positioning emphasize its use for previsualization, concept work, and short clips, not for end‑to‑end TV‑episode‑length production. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Survey and benchmark work on text‑to‑video models in 2024–2025 highlights that even top models (Runway, Sora, Kling, etc.) still exhibit complex distortions, unnatural actions, and other artifacts that make high‑end, long‑form production challenging. (arxiv.org)

2. Industry and critical judgment vs. Mandalorian‑level production

   • Hands‑on reviews of Sora after public release conclude that, despite its strengths, it is not ready for mainstream video production or commercial storytelling, especially for longer, controlled narratives; it performs best for relatively simple short clips and still fails unpredictably on complex prompts. (theverge.com)
   • Major studio partnerships (e.g., Lionsgate and AMC Networks with Runway) explicitly frame AI video as a tool for storyboarding, pre‑vis, background elements, and post‑production assistance, not as a direct replacement for full VFX pipelines on big‑budget shows. (theguardian.com)
   • A 2024 analysis of Runway’s film‑studio collaboration notes that while AI video can now create realistic moving imagery quickly, making an entire feature film with AI alone is still not expected in the near term; the tech is mainly used for segments and shorts. (ispr.info)
   • Large, high‑profile productions that leaned heavily on AI‑enhanced visuals, such as the Wizard of Oz adaptation for the Las Vegas Sphere, have drawn mixed or negative criticism specifically for the AI‑generated imagery quality, suggesting that fully AI‑driven visuals are still not consistently at top‑tier blockbuster TV/film standards. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • VFX‑community discussions in 2025 repeatedly point out persistent problems with long‑scene consistency, reproducibility, and character control in AI video tools, reinforcing that current systems are not yet a drop‑in replacement for traditional VFX workflows on dialogue‑heavy, multi‑shot scenes like those common in The Mandalorian. (reddit.com)

3. Gap between AI storyboards / pre‑vis and final output

   • There has been clear progress toward closing the gap Jason talked about: tools like Runway Gen‑4, Open‑Sora 2.0 and other modern models are explicitly used for cinematic previsualization and concept development, and research systems such as CineVision integrate scripts with real‑time AI pre‑vis to accelerate storyboard creation and director–cinematographer collaboration. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • However, these tools are still primarily positioned as aids at the previz / ideation stage; the last mile from AI animatic to final, broadcast‑quality VFX is still handled largely with traditional techniques. Industry commentary and technical evaluations do not support the view that, by October 2025, the gap has substantially closed in the sense that AI can routinely generate final shots at Mandalorian‑like quality with the required control and length.

Conclusion: By the April 2025 two‑year mark (and even by late 2025), text‑to‑video and AI VFX systems can produce striking short clips and are heavily used for pre‑visualization, but they are not yet at a level where their typical, controllable output is comparable to the overall visual standard of a show like The Mandalorian, nor has the storyboard‑to‑final‑shot gap substantially closed in mainstream production pipelines. Given that the time windows in the prediction have now passed and the core claim has not materialized, the prediction is best judged as wrong, albeit directionally pointing toward real (but insufficient) progress.