The Great (Hollywood) Depression

Deadline is covering the major economic contraction that is currently rocking Hollywood and its related industries. Seems like a variety of factors have combined to really shake things up. Time will tell what the future holds...

“I’ve seen lots of downturns, lots of job losses but I’ve never seen anything like this,” one veteran top TV executive said. “This is a full-scale depression for the entertainment industry.”

The dire situation, “bordering on worst-case scenario,” the seasoned TV executive said, was created by a perfect storm of Covid, strikes and “poor management decisions coming home to roost” driven by short-sighted moves by media companies aimed at goosing their quarterly reports to appease Wall Street.

Full article here:

This Is A Full-Scale Depression

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I think the days of unqualified family members and friends holding key positions will be over sooner than later. It was always about "who you knew". Hollywood had a great run being its own little world. Today though there is so much more out there to grab the audiences attention, and the ease of which studios made (plus spent) money are going to be a thing of the past. They are going to be forced to evolve.

Certainly the covid shut downs, the strikes, and what they referred to as "peak TV" all have had a negative effect.

But what the industry media and Big Media seem to ignore is that there has been a tendency with the big studios --Disney, e.g.-- toward making pictures that they believe the public should see because of fashionable social notions, rather than determining what the public wants to see, and giving it to them.

Surprisingly, despite costly bomb after bomb, the studios continue to use their stories to preach rather than to entertain.

This is an absolutely ridiculous argument, and one that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. All of the studios are out to make money, and they all make movies based largely on what has worked before. This is what Hollywood has been doing since it started.

You mentioned Disney (we all know who tends to obsess with this studio, don't we?) - and their biggest efforts so far in the last 10 years or so have been to double down on stuff that had already proved successful. They bought Pixar, and Lucasfilm, and Marvel -- all of which had already become very popular brands before being acquired by Disney. They also stepped up efforts to make live-action remakes of their animated classics - something they had been doing since at least the 1990s, although at a much slower pace. And then they bought 20th Century Fox, with which they acquired some very popular franchises - Avatar, Predator, Planet of the Apes, etc.

But the rest of the studios are doing the exact same thing - betting heavily on established franchises like Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible, Dune, Despicable Me, Super Mario Bros, Fast & Furious, Godzilla, etc. etc. etc.

If something has worked in the past, then it's a good bet that Hollywood will try to keep turning out more movies of the same sort.

Even movies that seem "new" are trading on the recognition of a popular brand or name - Barbie became a huge hit in part because people have known about the toy for almost half a century. Robert Oppenheimer was already a well-known name long before Nolan made a biopic about him.

The bottom line is, that it's always about the bottom line. A studio doesn't risk 100s of millions of dollars on anything that isn't a well-known IP or at least something with high name recognition.

There is hardly a week that goes by that I haven't read some news article pointing out the pitfalls of major corporations, film companies included, experiencing the general concept referred to as "get woke, go broke". Much of the general public evidently does not want social justice in their entertainment.

Here is an article from Forbes typical of the financial reporting from 2023. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolin...h=381df5093bed

I can't help noticing in some of your posts that you seem to enjoy stating to others that they're wrong. And when you tell someone that their views are "ridiculous", you're not going to get a lot of discussion from them.

None of those articles actually corroborate your opinions (and lets face it, this only an opinion of yours and not merely a fact) that “woke” films (oh how you love to throw that term around as if it actually supports your argument) are the reason for the films failure. Nor do they support anything close to the supposed argument that audiences don’t want social justice in their films. In fact, that article you linked doesn’t even suggest it has even ANYTHING TO DO WITH BEING “WOKE”, or social Justice. I mean,, Dial of Destiny? Secret Invasion? Please explain how being woke hurt those films box office numbers. I’ll wait…..

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to not only point out how ridiculous your opinions are, especially when presented by a flimsy argument with little or no corroborating evidence while ignoring alternative explanations, but also how ridiculous these claims are when presented in such a clumsy manner to begin with.

The reason for such low box office numbers could easily be Occam’s razor, in which the usual reasons are likely the correct one, rather than anything political, as you so often try to make it out to be.

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is overall an absolutely ridiculous argument that is totally untethered from reality, and does not have any actual facts to back it up. It amounts to one person saying that they don't like certain things in movies, and rather than naming those things, just throwing around a vague buzzword and claiming that the whole world agrees with them.

The actual facts show that the total box-office - the total amount that people spend yearly on movie tickets - is not yet back to the levels it had reached before the pandemic struck. That just clearly means people aren't watching as many movies in theaters as they used to - it does not mean that they have shifted from watching certain types of movies to other (un-woke?) types of movies.

Total box-office is way down because people are choosing to watch fewer movies in the theaters and, presumably, more of them at home, once they are available for streaming.

Because of the dual strikes last year, a lot of productions had to be put on hold and didn't resume shooting until after the end of the strikes (almost at the end of the year). This means that 2025 is another "down" year when it comes to the total box-office; the earliest that we could see the total box-office bounce back to pre-pandemic levels is now 2026.

If the industry hasn't fully bounced back by 2026, we might be looking at a permanent shift in consumer preferences, where more movies are consumed at home and fewer of them are perceived as worth going to the theater for.

Even going with anecdotal evidence, here in the forums I see a lot of people don't watch a new release until it has become available for home viewing.

Reminder that the discussion has to stay centered very much around films themselves. The moment people start posting just about culture war stuff, I'm closing the thread. And given the frequency with which people like to keep raising the same complaints over and over, I won't rule out warnings and/or temporary bans if that continues.

Regarding the subject of Disney's substantial losses, here is an article published today which highlights their recent board battles and an attempt by shareholders to focus on profits rather than any kind of agenda.
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/202...ion-at-disney/

A board battle at one studio seems to be rather tangential (at best) to the thread topic, tho.

From the OP, we have an executive saying “This is a full-scale depression for the entertainment industry.”

It seems to me that to stay on topic, we need to look at what's happening in the industry as a whole, wouldn't you agree?

My two cents...'The Great Hollywood Depression' is in part caused by an over reliance on metadata by studios looking to maximize short term profits by predicting what audiences what to see and then delivery that as their movie product.

Let's say you have the Burger King app on your phone, do you think the app was mainly created for your benefit? Those apps track metadata about purchases, volume of purchases, when, where and to what demographics purchased the product, etc, etc. In the same way metadata is being used to decide what movie products will sell best to the largest demographics and/or to the demographics that spend the most money on movies.

I suggest this process stifles alot of individuality and creativity by film makers. Thus we get a homogenized, prepackaged movie industry that's lost it's proverbial soul.

That's my explanation...not that I care I don't as there's always, indie film makers..and of course tens of thousands of old movies to watch.

I feel you're overlooking one important aspect, tho.

As I mentioned earlier, there has been a significant shift in how people consume films. Moviegoers are watching fewer movies at the theater and, apparently, more content at home, partly because generally it's a lot cheaper.

It is a lot like the struggle studios faced when TV became a thing. People could watch stuff at home for free and didn't go to the movies as much (moviegoing never recovered to its pre-TV levels, by the way)

When I say this:
In the same way metadata is being used to decide what movie product will sell best to the largest demographics and/or the demographics that spend the most money on movies.
I mean all movie related purchases, not just theater ticket sales.

Fair enough.

I don't think it's as simple as 'profitable films' vs 'woke agenda'. I think part of the push for more diverse representation in Disney films has to be because executives thought it would be profitable. They've done their demographic research and thought about who films might appeal to and how much merchandise they can sell them.


Nobody says 'go woke go broke' about Black Panther or the Spiderverse films or Barbie because they were popular and made money. It's a kind of confirmation bias when a film with a diverse cast is a flop.


There may well be a correlation between more diverse films and a poorer box office but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a casual link. Increased diversity in superhero movies has coincided with superhero fatigue in audiences, but it's not necessarily the cause of it. The Eternals was rubbish, but it wasn't rubbish because it had a diverse cast.


However, the danger is laziness, in studio execs thinking existing property plus diverse cast equals enough to greenlight a movie (hey, what if Ghostbusters but with women? etc), when fresh ideas and a good script are what is really needed. And the more they try to squeeze out of the same existing properties, the fewer fresh ideas there are.

I'm looking forward to a new geographical location to champion the movie industry. Hollywood as a location is worn out and played out. It isn't what it used to be and that contributes to this depression. I don't see another "golden era" coming out of California. They should pick up shop and find a new location. And do so before someone else gets the same bright idea. Dont let it stagnate.

The world is becoming less and less white European due to low birth rates, so Hollywood is making movies for the future, not just today.

Being a weekly "in-theater" guy, I've seen what has happened over the past 4 years. It was already well underway pre-covid, but then picked up steam. As an urban guy who does go to urban, PC theaters, I do not think it has much relationship to whatever "woke" is (generally a meaningless term for people with whom the accuser doesn't agree). I've seen the same lack of attendance for movies with or without any sort of agenda, with or without any moral message. I can't blame it on woke because all of my theaters are that, they WERE attractions as that, and the same thing has happened there, woke or not.

Nobody in the industry wants to acknowledge this, but, IMO, it's just the chickens coming home to roost because of all the factors.....streaming, disks that can be traded, borrowed or swapped, piracy, the combination of all of the above, and, the other big one.....the next paragraph.

Being a theater guy all through this, I have repeatedly noticed that the movies just don't seem as good. Whether it has an agenda or not, whether it's a brainless piece of entertainment, none of them seem like they aspire to much. It's like the industry is just tired. After dinner and a movie, I go home and ask myself, WHAT did we just see? Oh yeah...that one. Recently, I saw a couple of re-treads, the new Ghostbusters and the new Godzilla....completely predictable, nothing new and no appealing characters. There was Dune 2, which was mainly just sandy. There was One Life, as though I needed a Holocaust refresher,,,,etc. The only movie I have liked all that much was the much criticized (around here at least) Oppenheimer. The history geek in me knew lots about that story and I like what they did. Most people seem to not like it because it didn't have romance or emotion, or whatever. I'd advise them to watch Casablanca and stick with fiction, although that won't be in a theater. I don't know where we go with this and neither does the industry.

It just seems to be a rough patch for movies, between the Plague, trends that were already happening and GOK what else, a perfect storm. Maybe we need a Perfect Storm 2? Given a 2 or 3 year pipeline for movie production, we seem to be in the heart of the pandemic blues now.

no notes.

True, bio-pics are not my niche.