Grand Illusions of Hollywood 2023
Goodbye storied studios, magical CEOs and our Yellow Brick Road
It’s that time of year when I start appraising what the hell just happened. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll have, back-by-popular-demand, my annual Exit Interviews, and Ankler 100 list.
But I’m starting macro here today for my first entry.
Let me just state: This was the year when something big died in Hollywood.
Not the entire industry, which lives to fight another day (minus a few limbs and organs). This was the year when the things we believed and counted on about this business, the stories we told ourselves, the basic principles, the rules, the guideposts, you name it, finally rotted away.
This isn’t to get misty-eyed about the ghosts of Hollywood past. This was never a town of Boy Scouts. From Carl Laemmle down to Bob and Terry, no one was ever under any illusion that the folks who ran this place wouldn’t make off with the Lion right out of the logo if they thought they could trade it for a week’s supply of Partagas.
But it was all within the understanding of: first we have to make this place work, or we have nothing.
As we stagger away from the Streaming Wars, you get the sense that somewhere along the way it became every man (still, not really much need to insert “woman” here) for himself, and get what you can before the bottom falls out on the whole thing.
This was the year when the tide went out and we saw this danse macabre for what it was. Today, it’s the jump ball around long-suffering Paramount. Our non-Comcast legacy studios’ stocks, floundering along in their five-year trough, while waves of four and five-figure layoffs sweep over the industry like cloudbursts.
For the legacy studios, nothing seems to be working. The streaming strategies are in the midst of gigantic pullback. The cable bundle — helped along by the focus on streaming — is in freefall. And theatrical is more or less taking a year off in 2024; we’ll see what’s left for it when it returns.
This is the reckoning of the Streaming Wars at hand, and there’s no guaranteed outcome for anyone. At the moment, consolidation almost feels like a good outcome (even though it’s a very very bad outcome). Where this ends for the legacy studios is a wide-open question.