Rushfield's State of Showbiz: Enough!
Rushfield's State of Showbiz: Enough!
Quarterly earnings obsession. Worship of CEOs, not stars. The Analystocracy Era must end
Ladies and Gentlemen of Hollywood and the greater worldwide entertainment project. Last year, I stood before you as entertainment teetered on the brink. Would audiences ever return to movies or would they just move on? Were the streaming services and their unsustainable models a pied piper leading the industry on a long walk off a short pier? Was our obsession with our internal problems so great and our reckoning with our world-historic failings so immense that we could never get to the other side of them?
On all these questions, one year ago the jury was very much out... with the winds blowing in the direction of end times.
One year later, I stand before you with the imminent emergencies largely behind us, and tonight I can proudly say, the state of showbiz is slightly less screwed up!
But! Still worrying!
Together we stared into the face of death, looked the devil in the eye and said — maybe later.
But catastrophe delayed is not catastrophe denied. While the shutdown is behind us, the forces that caused so much uneasiness continue to howl from the woods and will have to be reckoned with if this industry is to survive.