State of the Industry 2024: Hope

Amid gloom, I have optimism for the future of Hollywood entertainment

(Photo illustration by The Ankler)

Friends, neighbors, colleagues and fellow citizens of entertainment.

This marks my eighth address to you as your columnist and crank-in-chief. When I first spoke to you, Hollywood stood socially and industrially almost unchanged from the 90s’ model and the days of Eisner and Ovitz, Terry and Bob.

Harvey Weinstein walked the streets as a captain of industry in good standing. Les Moonves reigned as the chief of America’s largest, most unstoppable broadcast network, at the helm of an independent company. Six major studios, including Fox, made full slates of films — cumulatively, they released 126 in 2016 — all while bickering endlessly with implacable theater owners who would not budge one inch from the sacrosanct window.

The Oscars were viewed by more than 30 million people, which was considered a disappointing slump.

Directing was the exclusive province of white men to a degree that would make apartheid states blush.

Netflix was routinely mocked as studios were happy to dump their catalogs on what they perceived to be a bargain bin website, and none had even begun planning launching their own services.

While the tech giants had rolled over much of the world’s economy, they had barely put a toe into Hollywood and could still safely be mocked as our socially incompetent, fatally unfashionable neighbors to the north. 

While there had been some near misses, no Hollywood union had gone on strike in a decade and labor talks were generally sleepy affairs.

Quarterly earnings conferences were watched by stock analysts . . . and almost no one else, their write-ups relegated well off the homepage on most trade sites.

It’s been quite a not-quite decade. Change for good and for bad has come faster than we can keep up with, and it has often felt like the industry was careening down the 101 at 90 mph with no one at the wheel and the 134 split lying dead ahead.

The terrors visited on 90s Hollywood in the time since are so familiar and have been recounted so often, they’ve become like the Passover recitation of the plagues, starting with the boom and crash of the Streaming Wars and pouring out from there.

Our problems are substantial and well-known, and the lack of leadership in the face of serial debacles is a scandal. But having walked through them so many times in this column, we will spare you another airing.

Because this evening I stand before you with a different message. Today, I can report to this community that the state of our industry is pretty screwed up, but maybe, just possibly, approaching a bottom soon. 

No, things have not turned around just yet. But if we look at the track ahead of us, the end might well — possibly, maybe — be in sight.

How can I say this? After eight years at sea, how dare I give the passengers of the good ship Showbiz hope?

Well, because a few things are happening to suggest better days are ahead.

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The Turning Point

First of all, if this were a true freefall, we would see interest in entertainment collapsing along with the companies that make it. And that isn’t happening, anywhere.