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If it wasn’t obvious already, Hollywood is in crisis. While the box office still churns out millions thanks to endless remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels, the industry itself is shrinking. Filming is being shipped overseas, AI is creeping into scriptwriting, and in just the last year we’ve seen two massive strikes shake the foundation of the business.
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The magic of Hollywood, I think, is one movie, one weekend, can change the entire outlook of the entire industry
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There's no good way to put this, so let's just call it like it is
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Things are bleak right now. Sure, the theatrical box office might be raking in millions due to the never-ending wave of remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels
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but the industry at large is hurting. Nothing shoots in L.A., there's the looming threat of A.I., and we're coming off the back of two major strikes
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Hollywood is in trouble. And yet there's an even bigger singular cancer running through the back
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alleys of Tinseltown, a problem so large no one wants to actually interface with it
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Essentially, every issue in the movie industry can be drawn back to a single reason
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the rise of big tech. We are right in the midst of the streaming wars
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We are. Which have just begun. Up until this point, have massive studios controlled the film and TV industry? Yes
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they absolutely have. However, these massive corporations have grown and metastasized into something distinctly different
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And they have one goal, extract every dollar and then burn it all down
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But if you're on this call, this is confirmation that you are part of the unlucky group
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who are having their contract terminated with immediate effect on the grounds of staffing redundancy
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And today is your final day of employment. Basically, since the introduction of the syndication model
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most TV and film had the same structure. Films were produced, they had their day in the sun
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and if the studio made money on the project, more films like them would be produced
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This was the same with TV, with the extra bite of the Apple that was licensing the shows to affiliate channels
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However, these two models would be decimated in just a few short years
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thanks to arguably the most impactful pivot a single business has ever made
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DVD rental giant Netflix today is launching a new service that lets subscribers watch movies on their computers
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Netflix which was originally a mail DVD company pivoted to streaming in January of 2007 Their DVD rental revenue was dropping and after trying and failing to sell themselves as Blockbuster they decided to swing for the fences
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Make a portal where you can watch anything you wanted, anytime, through the internet
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No need for physical discs. No need to wait. Everything ever made right at your fingertips
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Netflix saw massive success. They even found a trend of people sitting and watching
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the entirety of a show from beginning to end. they termed this phenomenon binge-watching
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I don't remember the last time I got in the bathroom. Oh, my legs are like asleep. I a little bit feel like I have a bladder infection
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but I'm just gonna get antibiotics after the next episode. Yeah, okay, thanks. Bye
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So, I lost my job. One more episode? Yeah. They try to capitalize on this behavioral pattern
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by producing new shows which would exclusively air on their platform and cater to this viewing habit
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by releasing the entirety of the season at once. The most successful of these were Orange is the New Black
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and House of Cards, and Netflix released them at no additional charge to the subscriber. Why
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Because they wanted to keep people on the platform, building brand trust and ideally
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extrapolating this enthusiasm into their new subscribers. But notice that this business model
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doesn't actually put any additional money in Netflix's bottom line. This operating at a loss
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mentality is straight out of the go-to maneuver that every startup tech company runs
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The company's never made a profit. That's right. Now why? How does it, why? How does that, what
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Seems like a new math, doesn't it? It does. And now, almost two decades later
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they're still running this same financial model, producing and releasing shows that hopefully pull in new subscribers
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The only problem is they've now aggregated almost everyone who's interested in subscribing
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Not only did Netflix open up this dangerous financial model, but also it opened the door for other technology companies
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to throw their hats in the ring to cannibalize the marketplace even further
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Why would they want to do this? To produce movies and TV, as you guessed it
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commercials for their products. My mayor. Prime here It the future of delivery They been training us for months I need you to place an official order on Amazon to activate the drone Next Amazon obviously has Amazon Prime and they recently bought MGM
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They built Amazon Prime with the simple goal of getting subscribers to Amazon Prime shipping
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They just bought MGM. Isn't that enough for those mothers? No, no, they're vampires
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Apple has their own studio, again, as a commercial for the devices that you can watch their TV shows and movies on
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To make things worse, every studio has now been infested with the brain rot of these big tech companies' logic
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I'm going to just dump a ton of money on you, and all we want is to get the hit pump pumping
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Bounce between streaming and theatrical franchise creation, international marketing, yep. Disruption was a hot word a few years ago
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Every tech bro and would-be industry professional would throw it around left and right
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It was both a goal and a warning. All of these current tech giants made literally billions of dollars by dismantling the existing economic ecosystems and profiting off the carnage
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And for some reason, in the late-stage capitalist hellscape we live in today, that's something to be admired
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The signature displayed troubling traits of sociopathic tendencies. What? Characterized by an inability to accept bad news
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Hoover, sir, get this horrible woman the f*** out of my office now
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And this mentality has been so widely adopted that it's firmly perverted Disney into an almost completely different entity
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Dawn is the inventive playground of the Imagineers. Here to stay is a commercial juggernaut hellbent on generating profits and strip mining culture
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Just look at how they handled the rollout of their proprietary Netflix competitor, Disney+
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They butchered both the MCU and Star Wars by cranking out way too many shows too quickly
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But hey, they got what they wanted. The people flocked in droves to see the shiny things, which turned out to be not that sparkly
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There's a new Marvel out that's supposed to be nuts. We should go see that
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The most iconic representation of this misguided behavior is everything Warners has done with HBO Max Warners was sold to AT in the late 2010s Pretty quickly after that they made the interesting call to open up their own streaming service
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name it HBO Max, and then make the controversial call to release every one of their theatrically distributed
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summer blockbuster films day and date on the platform. It was massively popular
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And then, of course, AT&T sold Warners to Discovery in 2022. They decided to merge HBO Max with Discovery Plus
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and create the confusingly named Max, which then, just a few short years later
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would be renamed HBO Max. If that's not a perfect example of the musical chair's Ponzi scheme
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that Hollywood has become, then I don't know what is. Casey and Sarah and everybody at HBO
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Mac, no, I'm sorry. Just what we needed, another network. This corporate shadows war has served as the smokescreen
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for Warner's Discovery's new CEO, David Zaslav, to become the living embodiment of everything we've been talking about in this video
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He's gutted Warners by multiple rounds of layoffs, canceled numerous fully-completed projects as tax write-offs
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and prioritized low-cost, non-union reality programming in an effort to maximize profits
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He's awful on every level, and he's not the only one running this playbook
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With the rise of AI-generated video and large language models looking ever more inevitable
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it really does feel like the end of filmmaking as an art form is extremely close
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If not literally, then existentially. We need an army of studios like Neon and A24 pushing back against this
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producing new and innovative works. We need to place emphasis on director-driven projects
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but those are few and far between. What does it say about our culture when the art form generally considered the pinnacle of humanist expression
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is being strip-mined to serve as weapons-grade pacification of the masses? Nothing good, that's for sure
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I did invent the hoolipod and the hoolipad and the Hoolipad Pro
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And technically, all the products he just named were money losers. I mean, you could argue we'd have been better off
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if he'd never invented any of that stuff