I mean, this is kinda like the second coming of Jesus where every generation says "it's coming! it's coming!" but is it really? I'm pretty sure people in the 30s and 60s and 80s have said the same thing about Hollywood, and I just don't think that's the case. Things change, sure, but so do we. Plus there's always tons of great stuff to watch and find, if you look hard enough.
A decline isn't just about a loss of quantity or quality, but also patterns of life, production, distribution, and consumption. The assumptions underwriting the supremacy of Hollywood have been on the decline for a long time.
We've Balkanized. Must See TV was really a thing when there were only three broadcast stations. Likewise, films as cultural events were much more common when the only way to see something really new was to go to the local theater. Now there are a endless platforms with streams of content. We're no longer reliably herding at Hollywood's old watering holes.
We've gone international. The geographic primacy of Hollywood is gone. Places like Toronto lured productions there with tax breaks. Production is much more international. It's no longer Hollywood predominating global markets with American products. Bollywood is its own thing. Increasingly we're see films made in Korea for Koreans, and it is the Americans who are being exposed to foreign products and consuming them.
We've democratized the means of production. You can make a competent movie with a high quality cell phone. Editing, colorization, suites of off-the-rack SXF, sound production, etc., now all fit on a common laptop computer. The real limitation today is having a story to tell, the talent to tell it, and the good luck to distribute it (because there's a lot of people in the marketplace now). This has demythologized Hollywood as the magic kingdom.
We're increasingly watching alone on our phones. This impacts aspect-ratio, slicing up the product segment more violently than the old rift between 4:3 and 16:9 did. Vertical video is a much different framing with a radically different aesthetic which requires more information (which the original camera did not collect) if you try to zoom out). And which crops out damned near everything purposes included in the original shot if you zoom in. Pick your poison. Stuff made for TikTok is purpose-made for the phone. And people are always on their mother-loving phones now. We're pod people. We got snatched decades ago. Because we're watching more and more on our phones, content is becoming more fragmented. It is the Twitter-zation of videographic content. Most stuff on YouTube was short to begin with, but the shift to our phones has caused YouTube to desperately push creators to make "shorts" that are only a few minutes long and in a vertical orientation so people have something to watch in a stolen moment "on the go." A lot of people are not consuming films, but film summaries.
In short, the monopoly is over. Hollywood could herald the return of filmic Jesus, but it wouldn't really matter that much. It cannot really matter in the larger pattern. Even if you suddenly got great directors making great films, even if Hollywood was not desperately going for gaudy spectacles featuring men in capes to get butts in seats, the game has changed, baby. We no longer worship in the old temple.
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