Agencies, Amazon, 'Ghost Town' Studios: How WFH is Killing Hollywood
As RTO orders come down hard, a relationship industry of resistant employees is put to the test: 'No, I'm not doing this'
This Ankler Feature is a 15-minute read.
When Amazon announced last month that employees will be required to return to the office five days a week starting in January, one Amazon Studios employee saw the news and quipped to a friend, “There goes my Friday golf game.”
Other reactions have been less jocularly gallows. Another Amazon Studios source says that the 30,000-person-strong Amazon Slack channel called Remote Advocacy — started when the company implemented a three-days-in-the-office rule in Feb. 2023 — “has gone off the rails. People are like, ‘No, I’m not doing this.’” (An anonymous poll of thousands of Amazon workers, meanwhile, reported that 73 percent are considering quitting over the policy and 91 percent are angry about it.)
Amazon may not be a wholehearted Hollywood company, but it is still a major piece of the entertainment industry thanks to its streaming business, and thus its work mandate is being eyed with more than mere curiosity in these parts. Four-and-a-half years after Hollywood went into lockdown, there is a growing sense that the hybrid work culture currently in place at most production companies and studios, including Disney, Sony and WBD — whereby employees work in the office three-to-four days a week and at home the rest — is detrimental to the industry. For a place famously run on face-to-face relationships, where deals were often hashed out over lunch at The Grill, the erosion of those traditions may help explain the industry losing its creative mojo.
These sentiments are shared by many in the 45-and-older crowd, who grew up in an industry where now 73-year-old Jeffrey Katzenberg’s famous line, “If you don’t show up to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday,” was said with dead seriousness. That stance, of course, came long before such technological innovations as Slack and internet videoconferencing made remote work possible. Today, the problem as some see it is that some employees are barely showing up on Wednesdays.
“Everybody’s got to come with their ‘A’ game,” says one agent-turned-producer. “Work from home is not your ‘A’ game.”
But Amazon’s decision to bring its employees back to a pre-Covid work routine — and the employee backlash it’s provoked — is indicative of the third-rail companies in Hollywood face around trying to turn back the clock to 2019 as they grapple with a distinctly 2024 landscape of an industry beset with issues. Lionsgate followed Amazon into the breach last month when it announced that all executive VPs and above will have to report to the office every weekday starting in January. “We are a creative organization that relies on communication and in-person collaboration,” CEO Jon Feltheimer wrote in a company memo, “and we need ‘all hands on deck’ to continue to operate effectively in these challenging times.”
But everyone else is paralyzed with fear. “There are conversations about” returning to five days in the office, says one executive at a major studio, “but it’s a balance of not wanting to rock the boat too hard. Look at what’s happening at Amazon.” (Talent agencies are the anomaly: They’ve been back in the office five days a week since 2021.)
For this story, I spoke with executives across studios and production companies; former and current agents from agencies such as WME and CAA; as well as younger workers whose beliefs about what’s important are distinctly anti-Katzenbergian—or anti- any people they believe are responsible for the mess of today’s industry. None were willing to speak on the record given the sensitivity of the topic and fear that their employers would not react well. I break down the issues by what’s happening at studios, agencies and in animation; as well as the fractious debates taking place over the value of IRL meetups versus online ones; if Fridays will ever again be seen as an in-office day; and the outlook on whether 2025 will be the year all of Hollywood mandates a return to the office.
The question is, is it too late to go back?