Right now Hollywood is taking it on the chin, the gut, the head, and just about every other metaphorical body part that can be punched.
Thanks to the Biden Recession and its resultant inflation, people are cutting back severely on their entertainment budgets to concentrate on such luxuries as “food” and “rent.” At the same time that started to kick in, Hollywood fully embraced wokeness, resulting in movies and TV shows that alienated large segments of their existing customer base. From 2015 to 2019, Hollywood brought in more than $11 billion in domestic box office, thanks largely to once-juggernaut franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar (a studio that used to function like a franchise) and Jurassic Park, and even throwing out Flu Manchu-wrecked 2020, they have yet to return to that level of ticket income. Note that the first three of those franchises all belonged to Disney, which came down with one of the worst cases of Social Justice, from which hasn’t entirely recovered, and Disney stock has been on a mostly steadily downward trend since 2021.
On top of that, the last five years saw most major studios jump headlong into the streaming wars. The result? Everyone lost except Netflix. Everyone lost money launching their streaming services, and the huge need for new content, plus the mind virus of wokeism, meant garbage like Rings of Power, Velma and She-Hulk got green-lit. For Disney, the need for content not only radically increased costs, but also helped cheapen the previous powerhouse brands of Marvel and Star Wars with too much mediocre-to-bad content.
But the jump into streaming didn’t just increase costs, it decreased the income from existing revenue streams like broadcast and cable TV (now referred to as “linear” TV). With so much premium content moving to Internet-based services, a whole lot more people cut the cord for cable TV.
While all this was happening, Hollywood’s actors and writers unions looked at the money being shoveled into streaming and went “Hey, we want a bigger cut of that,” and went on strike, some even losing their houses (which honestly for a four month strike, seems like really poor financial planning) in the process. As a result, they won pay increases and additional “seats” in writer’s rooms right before everything started to collapse.
The results? Layoffs. “During the 2023 Hollywood strikes, the Los Angeles region’s share of national Film and TV employment fell to 27%, compared to 35% just the year before.” More: “Employment is down 9.1% (12,900 jobs) from 2013 to 2024 for the traditional entertainment industries of Film and TV, Sound, Print Media and Broadcasting.” I don’t think anyone thinks of 2013 as any kind of “golden age.” (Well, except maybe for the finale of Breaking Bad.) More: “Employment in ‘motion picture and sound recording’ has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year.”
This is why Deadline has a regular Hollywood Contraction section. Things are so bad that they’re even laying off executives (I know, world’s smallest violin), and many don’t expect to ever be employed in the industry again. “If you’re a middle-age white man, you’re feeling really struggling to see if you’re going to be hired again.”
Let’s list a few of Hollywood’s litany of woes, some of which we’ve covered here before.
And then, as this contraction runs its course, all of Hollywood has to worry about the looming threat of AI. AI is not good enough for Joe Schmo to make movies that rival Hollywood from his PC, but given enough computing power, we may live to see it. But in the meantime, a whole lot of technical jobs are probably going to disappear into AI expert systems. Instead of five lighting techs, there will be one lighting tech overseeing the AI automatically adjusting the networked smart lights.
It’s possible that 2019, the year when Avengers: Endgame was setting box office records, may be looked back on as the pinnacle of Hollywood’s 21st Century Golden Age…
