Causes for Hope; Causes for Despair
Are we in fact doomed? And how doomed are we?
Living here amongst the fallout of the Streaming Wars, spending your days picking through the devastation it wrought, end-of-the-world narratives are never more than an arm’s length away. In the past few months, I’ve heard enough harrowing tales of hopeless job hunts, families on the brink and dreams destroyed to last me a lifetime. Every day brings more tales of cutbacks at the bottom, and middle, and upper middle — and cluelessness at the top.
It’s easy at times like these to believe that we’re well into a death spiral that will write the final chapter of the Hollywood experiment. On the other hand, one can find one grasping for any (and perhaps every) faint ray of hope. Any time a film opens on the upper edge of its NRG range, it’s an occasion to declare “We are saved! The people have returned to us!”
By the laws of business, Hollywood should be doomed for all it’s done to itself lately. By the laws of nature, entertainment is eternal, and nothing these fools can do can truly dent that basic human need.
Taken in isolation, every problem is surmountable. Taken together . . . I’m not so sure. It’s a labyrinth of dead ends we’ve wandered into, and I’ve been waiting for a long time for someone here to map the path out.
At this moment, we’ve got three disasters converging at once: Theatrical is flailing, TV production is being slashed and the cable bundle is disappearing. One of those at any given time would be enough to make it feel like the industry is in great distress. All of them at once feels like God is unleashing the great flood.
Yes, entertainment is eternal, but if eternity looks like a couple of streamers, no broadcast production and a theatrical world that’s a fragment of what it is today — say, 40 major releases a year instead of 120 — well then, the “world” will go on but not for many of us.
As Ninotchka put it, “Next year, there will be fewer but better Russians.”
For every data point that suggests there’s no way out of this, there are reasons to believe the worst is past. So which is it? Is this the middle of the end, or are we building back better?
As the poet William Blake writes:
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night
Wondering which fate awaits us seems the question behind every conversation in Hollywood these days. And fortunately or no, both doors seem very open at this point.
Here’s a rundown of the conflicting signals, driving everyone to madness in Hollywood circa 2024.