Why Hollywood is Self-Imploding

10.8.24

Hollywood studios have laid off thousands of employees in 2024, with no end in sight. The industry execs are scrambling to restructure, reset, and reinvent their companies for a changing media landscape. They tried to win the Streaming Wars, and suffered a humiliating loss by trying to be something they are not (maybe they should see Mean Girls or Pretty in Pink and learn about why it’s best to play to your own strengths and be yourself). Q3 layoffs affect stock prices, and if you haven’t heard the latest goss, stock value is the single most important thing in show biz, baby.

What this tells us is that studios are trying to run themselves like tech companies; far more interested in speculative monetary value than artistic value, and seemingly unconcerned with the longevity of the industry they are consciously imploding. They are so focused on having increased profits every quarter that their product– that is, film and television– is merely a means to an end. And the manufacturers of their product– that is, creatives and crew members– are disposable, replaceable, and ultimately unimportant; as irrelevant to their bottom line as a factory worker is to iPhone production. The consumer– once called an audience– is only a data point and a dollar sign. 

The effect that this mentality has on the industry is so far-reaching that we’re only beginning to understand the true cost of their greed and caustic myopicism. 

When you run an entertainment company NASDAQ-forward, single-mindedly obsessed with data and algorithms and company performance, you stop taking risks. You only greenlight two kinds of projects: pre-existing IP that is sure to bring in those dollar bills regardless of the quality of the film, and prestige projects that no one sees that win awards for being “brave.” The Oscars have more than lost their relevance, not because people don’t like or care about movies, but because there is so little original material reaching them, literally and figuratively. 

This isn’t the first time Hollywood has been forced to reinvent itself. 

When television became mainstream in the 1950s, Hollywood fought back by making films that you had to see in theaters; aesthetically impressive, colorful, anamorphic widescreen films. The studio system of the Golden Age was falling apart, rickety and growing irrelevant. They pivoted, yes, but they put the art first. Make good films, not mediocre fast-fashion content, and you will survive.

Then again, in the late 1960s, audiences lost interest in the films being made, as they largely ignored youth culture. After the indisputable success of films like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, which were box office successes as well as artistically lauded, studios went to film schools to find new and exciting directors making new and exciting work to accommodate the changing audience. Hollywood readjusted its focus to zero in on young artists, taking huge and expensive risks on directors like Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorcesse, and Francis Ford Coppola. At the time, Alan Ladd, Jr. was the president of 20th Century Fox. He fought for these visionary artists, including an unproven director named George Lucus, who had one hit feature under his belt (American Graffiti) and one absolute clunker (THX 1138). The script to Star Wars was not finished and certainly not polished. But Ladd believed in Lucas’ vision based on the concept art and a really good pitch–  a film like the old Buck Rogers but with WWII-style dogfights in space. That’s how Star Wars got made. One guy with power and influence believing in a young artist. 

50 years later, Hollywood pumps out sequels and prequels and shows and films based in the Star Wars universe. But in reality, there hasn’t been a Star Wars in decades. Not because writers don’t have ideas, or because directors aren’t particularly forward-thinking, but because there is no one at a major studio that would trust a director, unproven or not, with a new idea that is that massive and expensive. If George Lucus had the misfortune of being born a Millennial, he would likely be working in marketing, coming up with cool ideas on how to sell Nikes instead of having the opportunity to make something meaningful.

The execs will tell you that the medium of film is doomed. They’ll tell you that they just can’t compete with TikTok, or the other 97 screens we all have in our modern lives. They’ll ignore the data that says 85% of young adults aged 18-34 stream a film at least once a week and focus on the data that says 46% of adults don’t frequently go to the cinema. What they fail to realize is that they, the studio heads, are the problem. They are killing their own industry and bathing in the blood money. They refuse to do anything interesting or risky, then churn out subpar films with little-to-no relevance to modern audiences; films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and have absolutely nothing to say. 

Humans are storytelling creatures. From the cave to the Greeks to Shakespeare to Billy Wilder to Charlie Kaufman, we crave stories. We need to see our experiences, our emotions, our lives reflected back to us. It is as essential to the human soul as water and food are to the human body. Stories create culture; culture creates civilization. So what does it say about modern civilization that stories and art have been so commodified that the people charged with facilitating their existence cannot differentiate between the business of creativity and the business of Wall Street? What do we do when films are only content, when movies are only a product, when writers and directors are never given the hope of a chance at a shot at making their art? What happens when you stifle these voices, feed audiences relative slop, lay off thousands of employees, destroy Hollywood’s working- and middle-class, and never take anything approaching a risk?

You end up where we are right now. So, have you seen any good movies lately?