Hollywood on the brink: The end of an era for the movie capital of the world? • FRANCE 24 English

[mono]

 

[Johnny Karlsson]

Yeah, it’s brutal.

[The Documentary Sound Guy]

Yeah, it's brutal, but I feel like writing it down to not being competitive on production costs misses the point.  Cost structure isn't the problem; the demand and revenue side is the problem.  The studios lost their market, and are still figuring out how to get it back.  The majority of the finance and greenlight authority still flows through L.A., but production is down because the audience has fractured, and the big studios no longer control it.

 

Production is down something like 40% everywhere, not just in Hollywood.  I'm not convinced Hollywood's loss is New Mexico's gain.  I work in Vancouver; we invented the tax credit system that undercut Hollywood production crews.  Our American service sector is suffering just as badly as Hollywood.

 

The industry has always been boom and bust, and right now it's a bust; we've had a decade of boom while the major streamers dumped obscene amounts of cash as they tried to steal audiences.  They were spending way beyond their means, and it was always a matter of time before it got scaled back.  In the meantime, they've stolen enough audience from original studios that nobody has enough revenue to justify that scale of production we got used to before covid.  And even that doesn't take into account the cultural shift away from movies and TV to gaming and YouTube.

 

Hollywood is finally being forced to face the reality that independent film has been facing for three decades (since the "digital filmmaking" revolution):  It's nearly impossible to build an audience from scratch that can pay for the cost of production the way Hollywood does it.  Audiences have alternatives now that cost a tiny fraction of what Hollywood productions cost.  Sure, they aren't as shiny or exciting; in many cases they aren't even recognizable as movies or TV, but their production costs are so much smaller that they can crank out content and balance their books, and they require a much, much smaller audience to make a profit.

 

Until Hollywood figures out how to build audiences on their own terms again (rather than trying to buy audiences by developing "IP"), we're going to see the industry shrink, especially at the top end.  I think it's a legitimate question how much of that top end will ever come back.  It may be that the cultural moment for "movies" has passed, and there is no business model for the giant tentpole movies that have sustained the industry for the last 20 years.  If that means the end of American cultural hegemony, I won't even mourn it that much, for all that it will hugely impact my career.

 

More likely, there will continue to be a (smaller) market for high end Hollywood productions will excellent writing and acting, and the studios will eventually adapt (the way the big music studios adapted to Napster 20 years ago).  They still have huge resources at their disposal, and I'm not just talking cash.  Their distribution networks, the star system, their cultural relevance will all help them weather the storm.  We'll see a bust for the next decade, and then it will boom again ... we just may not recognize what the industry looks like by then.

 

/rant

[Johnny Karlsson]

3 hours ago, The Documentary Sound Guy said:

(the way the big music studios adapted to Napster 20 years ago). 

Well, I would say they didn’t. And still haven’t. So I hope it’s going to work somewhat differently here, but yeah right now looks kinda bleak.

 

 

[The Documentary Sound Guy]

15 minutes ago, Johnny Karlsson said:

Well, I would say they didn’t. And still haven’t. So I hope it’s going to work somewhat differently here, but yeah right now looks kinda bleak.

I guess that's a matter of what recovery looks like.  Universal, Sony and Warner still dominate the music industry.  Their dominance is broader now, but the album is dead.  And we're never going back to recordings being the cash cow that they were.  But the industry is still around, and with the addition of LiveNation, the same companies are still running it.

 

I fully expect the same three, Universal, Sony and Warner (plus Disney and Paramount) to dominate our industry 10 years from now.  Maybe add Netflix as well, and assume there will be some consolidation.  But the movie as we know it is dead, and TV might be as well.  That doesn't mean there won't be movies (same as there are still music albums being released).  But movies won't be a primary revenue stream (they haven't been for a while).  Whatever the industry evolves into will look different.

 

So yeah, I guess I agree, it looks bleak, especially for business as usual.  And, as much as the big music studios have survived, what didn't survive were the budgets that used to go into recording and that used to support recording studios and proper salaries for recording engineers.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried the same will happen to a lot of the technicians that currently work on Hollywood-scale productions.

 

I work in documentary; I already know what small-scale production looks like.  I expect to see way more of that (in the form of 'reality' production), and way less scripted / union work.

[codyman]

I'd say the beginning of the end was when "content" overtook movies and TV all while DVD sales/rentals + ticket sales plummeted.  There still will be movies and TV, but for most people in the world, they don't even bother going to the cinema anymore and their Netflix ques runnith over.  I don't have a crystal ball but I don't foresee "growth" in the space we're in but instead, a weird stew of gig here, gig there of varying degrees of quality while maybe getting a gold nugget of a project once in a while.