10 Lessons From Hollywood’s Brutal Year
A clear-eyed look at what failed, what worked and what comes next
First: Photo Caption Winners!
Last week, I asked readers to caption a Warner Bros. photo of their new would-be owners touring the lot.
We got a ton of great responses. Here are my picks for the winners:
“And over there, you can see Jack Warner is turning over in his grave.” — JM
“Is that where I’m going to make the movie I won’t release in theaters?” — CM
“Hey, now we only need one more horseman for the Apocalypse.” — LT
“This lot is giving me Gilmore Girls pumpkin spice latte pop-up vibes. Does someone have Brian Niccol’s number?” — SF
“See those theaters over there with traditional windows. I’m keepin’ ‘em all. Just like I promised.” — BB
Congrats on your prize: A free annual Ankler subscription to gift for the holidays or for yourself.
What A Year It Has Been
Usually, the pleasure of a year-end column is the looking back — the rounding up the highs and the lows of the year can be the fun part of a columnist’s job. This year, that instinct was harder to summon. The problems facing Hollywood are no longer hidden, emerging or even debated. They are obvious, entrenched and exhausting. A few points of light broke through, but by and large… regrets, we’ve got more than a few.
I skipped several of my usual year-end rituals because re-litigating the same failures can feel less like analysis than masochism. But if there’s any chance of turning the page — if next year is going to be anything other than a rerun of this one — then a few uncomfortable truths still need to be stated plainly.
So, in that spirit, one more look back at the last year in Hollywood — and what comes next.
1. Finance is Driving Us Off a Cliff
The push and pull between finance and creatives is what made Hollywood strong for a hundred years. The pendulum swung back and forth, but it always righted itself before it capsized the ship — which it inevitably would do if it swung too far in one direction or the other.
But it has never swung as far in one direction as it has now.
Which is why rooting for creators, even at the expense of “financial common sense,” is really about trying to right the ship.
When I say I don’t care how much a movie costs or loses, it’s not because I want production built around throwing stacks of hundreds into the fireplace. It’s because we are so far into the penny-pinchers’ end zone that we desperately need to push the ball back up the field, just a little.
Profitability matters. But among the many threats facing this industry, a sudden outbreak of reckless, art-for-art’s-sake excess doesn’t crack my top hundred. The vastly more likely outcome — and the far more dangerous one — is an industry so allergic to risk that it stops taking big swings altogether.
That’s how audiences drift away. Not because too many movies dared to fail, but because too few dared to try.
So a little outbreak of fiscal wildness here and there, in the name of creative innovation, is what Hollywood badly needs, and whatever the bill for that is, you should be glad it comes so cheap. Nearly every other issue on this list — the cowardice, the soullessness, the short-term thinking — flows from the unchecked reign of finance and a generation trained to see only quarterly outcomes, never long-term cultural value.
2. Trade Media in the Finance Passenger Seat
If finance is driving the car, the trade press is no longer in the backseat asking uncomfortable questions. It’s riding shotgun — and, more often than not, helping with the navigation.
This isn’t to say that the financial analyst community is literally paying off members of the trade press, or that dealmaking lawyers get to dictate the slant of every story (although I’m not saying those things don’t happen). It’s that the trade press is reflexively drawn to power — besotted with the biggest figures in the room — and easily swayed by the logic of finance, dealmaking, and access.
Once that logic sets in, it becomes the default worldview. Alternatives are waved away as naïve. Anything that challenges the premises of the money people is treated as unserious, unrealistic.
You can see it right now in the coverage of the Netflix/Warner Bros. deal, which is being framed as inevitable before the review process has even begun. The outcome is being normalized in advance, as if gravity itself were at work, rather than a series of choices made by people who benefit from those choices.
If they seem to be standing up to a lord of a great house, always watch whose water they are carrying. It is rarely the creative community’s. More often, that lord has simply fallen afoul of Bro-llywood by being too ostentatious, too aggressive — an embarrassment to the good name of Bro-llywood.
They also don’t particularly like movies and are more than happy to see them go away. To be replaced by sports talk shows, if possible.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Just once!
3. Our Leaders Won’t Save Us
If there’s a defining theme of Hollywood in 2025, it’s the failure of this industry’s leaders to meet even the most basic expectations of leadership.