Nikon has a long, storied relationship with Hollywood. When it came to picking lenses, Zeiss and Nikon had more than their fair share of wins with Hollywood DOPs, Bollywood DOPs, and all the other woods' DOPs (DOP=directors of photography, or cinematographer). There was even a cottage industry of modifying standard Zeiss and Nikon lenses with focus puller gears and calibrated t/stops.
Today? Well, everyone still loves putting their old AI Nikkors on even their latest and greatest digital video cameras, but modern Nikkors? They don't play so well. It has nothing to do with optical quality, which hasn't gone down. It has everything to do with G and AF-S.
The G-type lens doesn't have an aperture ring. You can find mount adapters that allow you to "adjust" aperture with G lenses, but the days of tight calibration and repeatable results are gone. In Hollywood, those things are important because you need to exactly match exposure both between takes made at different times, but also with scenes filmed with multiple cameras. Unless you use a G lens at maximum aperture there is no certainty with which to work with. Even very small differences in exposure make for visually glaring changes across cuts between cameras (and a lot of extra work for the Footage Grader).
Likewise, AF-S pretty much kills the focus pulling. The old Nikkor primes had long rotation on the focus ring, which allowed you to gear it up and pull focus both precisely and with very fluid changes. AF-S lenses, by design, try to limit the movement of the focusing elements, and thus tend to have very short rotations. Gone again is the precision, and it's tough to get a gear small enough to do slow, fluid pulls.
So today we're in a world where every still camera is also a video camera. How does that work? Well, most of us who use a Nikon DSLR for video ultimately ditch the G/AF-S lenses and get out our old AI and AI-S lenses (on some bodies that's the only way we can even get close to any manual video exposure control, anyway). Those of us who are recording video on bigger formats (I use a large sensor Sony video camera for serious video work) do the same thing.
Those buying new lenses for video often opt for PL mount Zeiss lenses. Zeiss still makes lenses with long focus throws and real, calibrated apertures, after all. Plus the PL mount pretty much can be used with any of the video camera choices.
So wither Nikon and its relationship with Hollywood? History, it appears. As in "use one of our historic lenses." I alluded to this more than a year ago when I suggested that the right approach for Nikon was to make a dedicated video camera and lenses. With Sony and Panasonic now bridging the gaps in their still/video lines and Canon likely to do so, Nikon is left as an odd man out. Sure, they've got "video capabilities" in their still cameras. But when it comes to the things that serious videographers and Hollywood desire, they don't have the goods.
This implies that Nikon's pursuit of video in DSLRs has been a quick-and-dirty patch that won't hold up with time, at least for serious video work. Which brings me back to one of my oft-repeated comments: why bother? Put all that work into differentiating the still aspects of the still cameras.