What follows is an exploration of the potential utter demise of the motion-picture industry and Hollywood as we know it, and perhaps the entire structure of corporate media as a whole.
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Before we get there, a bit of housekeeping: I’ve had some feedback that my columns tend to be a bit dour of late, and in response I’ll have to simply offer that I’m guilty as charged.
It’s not all my fault, you know. Events have driven some of my more intensely negative recent scribblings. But it isn’t just that. In a little more than a month my second nonfiction book, Racism, Revenge, and Ruin, is coming out. It’s an examination of the effect Barack Obama had and continues to have on American culture, politics, and economics, and the research and writing of that book has had a pronounced effect on me.
It’s not that I think America is over. I do think that the status quo in just about every aspect of American society is broken and unsustainable, and what putting into effect any semblance of restoration or revival will require nothing short of a Herculean effort.
I didn’t have too many illusions about that before writing the book. But deep dives like those I’ve had to do into just how much damage Obama and the people around him and behind him have done tend to crystallize things.
Which amounts to the impression that if things are going to be put right, in many cases they’ll have to be smashed to bits and rebuilt differently.
If you’re a frequent reader of this column, it won’t be a surprise to you that I’m offering the motion-picture business as a golden example — and, as it happens, it might just be a hopeful one.
Because Hollywood, at least as you know it, is going to die even without conservatives killing it.
Don’t get me wrong: Your rejection of woke trash — like what Disney produces — or the gay-activist semi-porn comedy Bros a year or two ago, which lost so much money, or much of the rest of the unwatchable anti-American dreck streaming out of Hollywood, has played a big role in the unfurling disaster that the film and TV business has become. (READ MORE: Barbie Questions the Success of Feminism)
But there are structural corners into which the geniuses in charge of that industry have painted themselves. And the double strike of writers and actors currently freezing showbiz in place is leaving them very few outs. Their response to the strike, which is to starve out the writers and actors, won’t change the calculus.
Interestingly, the comedian Andrew Schultz put out a thread of five tweets on Friday that might well cut to the very core of that strike and what it represents for the film industry:
Thoughts On The Hollywood Strike:
1) The real issue is that actors and writers want fair residual payments from the streamers.
In order to define what is fair the streamers will need to share how many people are actually watching their shows.
And here lies the problem…
— Andrew Schulz 👑HEZI (@andrewschulz) July 21, 2023
3) If most of these streamers are losing money in an effort to gain market share the ONLY justification for their spending is their stock price being high.
Once that stock price tanks with the REAL viewership #’s the streamers will have to CUT BACK ON SPENDING.
Which means…
— Andrew Schulz 👑HEZI (@andrewschulz) July 21, 2023
5) If the actors and directors strike is successful by making the streamers release their real viewership…
The strike will essentially force the streamers to hire less actors and directors.
So they’re striking themselves out of work.
Just a hunch tho 🤷♂️
— Andrew Schulz 👑HEZI (@andrewschulz) July 21, 2023
There’s something else, too, which is that artificial intelligence is progressing to the point at which it will one day, not too long from now, be able to create custom movies and TV shows on demand with the capacity to control the cast, change the setting and scenery, and even tweak the plot. You’ll be able to get that, customized based on the number of prompts you can give the AI, and assumedly the actors and writers or their heirs would get paid royalties based on what you pay the platform from which you downloaded your custom show.
As a consumer, this could be nothing short of awesome. A young Andrew Dice Clay playing Fonzie in Happy Days, or Will Ferrell joining the cast of Animal House, could make for amazing entertainment. And for actors who are recognizable to the public, this could be a bonanza.
For everybody else, not so much. How do you break in as an actor when you’re competing for roles not just with other actors but also with AI-reanimated ghosts?
Add these problems on top of the fact that the people who control the movie studios are evil and stupid on a level perhaps never before seen in American business — Kathleen Kennedy, as of this writing, still has a job after completing the utter destruction of not one but two indestructible properties in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises — and it’s very hard to see how this industry survives.
Disney, essentially five minutes ago, was considered the gold standard not just in the film industry but in corporate media. And Disney is almost certainly destined for either a hostile takeover or a bankruptcy, and quite possibly both. Amid that, the company’s CEO, Bob Iger, is trying to unload its cable and broadcast channels (including ABC, ESPN, the Disney Channel, the FX channels, National Geographic, Freeform, and others), which are a third of its business.
Disney has lost $10 billion — that’s with a B — on its Disney+ streaming platform.
Get woke, go broke. This is what happens when you make propaganda instead of entertainment. Like Michael Jordan used to say, Republicans buy sneakers, too — but if you insult us nonstop, we won’t buy your movies.
Why is this hopeful? After all, it seems strange to think that the demise of an entire economic sector might be a good thing.
Besides the obvious — which is that film and TV disintegrating will likely take down the mega media conglomerates who control 80 percent of the movies made in America, the channels on your cable, and the majority of the news product you see, and those mega media conglomerates are a grossly disproportionate source of the cultural poison coursing through our national veins.
And the failure of those companies means that they get picked over and new entities who might better manage their intellectual property will snap up the IP and the delivery platforms at fire-sale prices. Welcome to the re-democratization of the media industry to come.
Even more hopeful: Look at the $124 million, as of Sunday, that Sound of Freedom has grossed at the box office. That’s a movie that was made for $14 million five years ago and on which Disney sat before finally releasing it to Angel Studios.
And look at the model Angel is building by crowdfunding its film projects, as with The Chosen, David, and The Shift — giving film-interested investors the ability to bring to life those projects they’re most intrigued by, which allows the market to drive which properties are greenlit rather than incompetent woke suits at five mega corporations.
The thing about crowdfunding, compared to the top-down investment model Hollywood favors, is that it’s a lot like a political candidate who can raise a large amount of money from both big and small donors compared to the candidate who self-funds — the latter might even have more money than the former, but what he doesn’t have is the assurance that anybody is actually supporting him. We’re finding out, particularly in the case of Woke Hollywood and its nonstop stream of cultural aggressions, that the voters in this metaphor think the self-funder is an out-of-touch rich jerk they don’t want to see in power.
There will be other players entering this market as its incumbent structure breaks down, and those players will look a whole lot more like Angel than they do Disney.
That’s what the future offers. The writers and actors striking and paralyzing a dying Hollywood are actually paving the way for the leveling of the industry and for something sustainable — both cultural and economic — replacing it.
And you can help bring this about. All you’ve got to do is continue not giving the incumbents your entertainment dollar when they insist on failing to entertain you.
