Sunday I watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire at the local Alamo Drafthouse. All of the trailers shown before the movie were for sequels or reboots:
I understand there’s a certain amount of irony in complaining that all the trailers were a sequel or a reboot before a movie that was a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a reboot, but usually Alamo has more varied trailer fare.
But that lack of originality, along with wokeness, the red ink carnage of the streaming wars, and the lingering effects of the most recent strikes, has led to a deep recession in Hollywood, so much so that Deadline has a regular Hollywood Contraction feature.
How bad is it? “Employment in “motion picture and sound recording” has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year.”
All this activity peaked in 2022, when 600 original scripted shows were in production, according to the network FX. That gave lots of opportunities to everyone who makes a film shoot possible: Writers, crew members, caterers, and actors, like Haddad Tompkins. But it didn’t last.
“When the beginning of 2023 happened, it seemed like there was this chill on production and making things and buying things,” she said.
Per FX’s count, the number of scripted shows dropped to 516 last year. Studios pulled back for a few reasons, according to Patrick Adler, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and head of the consulting firm Westwood Economics, which issued a recent report on the film industry workforce.
First, investors started feeling the effects of rising interest rates.
“Wall Street just got significantly less patient with the spending by the studios on streaming platforms as soon as money started to be more expensive,” Adler explained.
Second, he said, studios realized that consumers might not have as much capacity as they anticipated for lots of new streaming subscriptions.
Then, in May of last year, the Hollywood writers’ union went on strike, followed by the actors’ union…
The resulting work stoppages effectively shut the industry down for six months. But once both unions reached contract agreements with studios, many people in the industry expected production would pick back up. Maybe not to the level of the streaming bubble, but an uptick.
But in LA and New York, that hasn’t really happened. Actor Janie Haddad Tompkins said when studios were pumping out shows in the midst of the streaming bubble, she’d get one or two auditions per week.
“Now, it’s like I’ve had maybe one a month,” she said. “So it’s been bleak.”
The studio whose wokeness seems to have wrecked hardest is Disney. “Its last four high-profile releases bombed at the box office, losing over $1 billion between them. Once Hollywood’s most successful film studio, Disney was dethroned last year by Universal Pictures.” And Elemental was the worst performing film in Pixar history.
It’s so bad that even Hollywood regulars who tick all the proper intersectionality boxes are being laid off. Quel dommage! Here’s a Critical Drinker round-table on the subject.
“Every IP is dead. The snake has eaten its own tail. There’s no more tail left to eat.”
If Disney just could have avoiding injecting wokeness, it could have milked Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar and its own IP for decades. Instead, its wokeness and poor quality has alienated its core demographics, possible for a decade or more. And the rest of Hollywood hasn’t been far behind.
Tags: Critical Drinker, Democrats, Disney, Hollywood, Media Watch, Pixar, Social Justice Warriors, unions, video
“Hollywood Out of Ideas, Money, Jobs…”
Good. Die.
Was it just me, or did the trailer for “Furiosa” look awful? Like, if those were CGI effects, they clearly weren’t complete. And if they were practical effects, someone needed to fire the DP.
I wouldn’t quite say awful. I would say they’re leaning much to heavily on the “let’s have things moving toward the camera at an angle” trick. They used it a bit in Fury Road, but they seem to use it to excess here.
Frankly, I enjoy watching videos on You Tube more than most of the streaming content. And the only movies we have watched in a theater in the last few years are the releases by Angel Studios.
Here’s a chart of how many $ billion grossing movies Hollywood made in the past 15y:
2009 💰
2010 💰💰
2011 💰💰💰
2012 💰💰💰💰
2013 💰
2014 💰
2015 💰💰💰💰💰
2016 💰💰💰💰
2017 💰💰💰💰
2018 💰💰💰💰💰💰
2019 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰
2020 (0)
2021 💰
2022 💰💰💰
2023 💰💰
It’s like they suddenly forgot how to make movies people really want to see.
I mean, seriously. After the 2010s, that’s one helluva collapse.
Source: https://deadline.com/gallery/highest-grossing-movies-all-time/avatar-from-left-zoe-saldana-sam-worthington-2009-tm-copyright-20th-century-fox-all-rights/
There are two movie studios being built in the Austin area. One is in Bastrop and the other is in San Marcos. As I understand it, both will be sort of rent the bare walls type operation. If a movie maker wants to use the facility he brings his own cast and crew along with all the support people. The new studios don’t provide any kind of support. They are just state of the arts buildings where your crew can work. The huge facility in San Marcos announced that at full build out, they would only employee 35 local people. I would guess that those 35 people would be mostly things like security guards and facility and ground maintance people.
Maybe this is the way the industry is going to avoid unions.
[…] BUT OTHER THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW? Hollywood Out of Ideas, Money, Jobs. […]
The two best films/TV shows I’ve seen this year are Godzilla Minus One and Shogun on FX. Both stories of relatable human beings facing issues of love and faith, honor, war and death. The meaning of life. Both are splendid returns to classical moviemaking, which now has been replaced by PC lectures in Hollywood.
I wonder if it even possible for Hollywood to survive its own self-loathing. But many congrats to Japan for giving us these wonderful stories.
I’m so old I can remember cheering for the good guys, like Hans Solo and Indiana Jones.
Compare this to morally ambivalent “heroes” such as Adam Clay, who is glamorized in The Beekeeper and some older releases showing alienated women like Jane Fonda, who starred in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Truth, Justice and the American Way appeal to a much wider audience than “burn it all down”. But if Truth is purely subjective, Justice is white privilege keeping the poor black man down and the American Way is despoliation of the environment and exploitation of the poor, who will leave the theater feeling edified or encouraged to take a friend to see it?
One of the reasons the early Marvel movies were popular is because they reprised the old struggle between Good and Evil- Captain America v the Red Skull. This was true on a smaller scale for animated movies like The Incredibles.
If a movie does not appeal to the whole family, the producer is voluntarily surrendering a significant part of the movie-going market. Perhaps the plaudits of your Hollywood peers counts for more than the ready acceptance of the paying public but self-congratulation is no way to stay solvent.
With all due sympathy to the subject at hand , and with full awareness that I am more than a bit of a pedant, I suggest that the writer brush up on his use of the contraction, “it’s” vs. the possessive pronoun, “its” — a common yet irritating issue these days.
I just read an article on all the Hollywood actors with Trans kids. Its crazy. Naomi Watts, Jolie and Pitt, Benning and Beatty, Sting, Signorney Weaver, the list goes on—
There is something wrong- its broke and no one can fix it. Maybe the Mullahs. Sharia Law anyone?
I’ve been watching a lot of KDrama’s on Netflix and Prime. The only slight drawback are the subtitles which you get with any foreign movie and don’t really bother me if everything else is good. I think the writing, acting and production values are easily as good as Hollywood, maybe better in some cases. I’m not sure how they turn out so 16 part X 1 hr episodes. Everyone in Korea must work in the film industry. Although Studio Dragon, the leader in KDrama’s just had their stock tank. But if you like well done long series check them out.
It’s hard to imagine an industry I feel less sorry for. Maybe journalism. As they continue to wallow in the bed they’ve crapped all over they apparetly have decide to neither get out of that bed nor to quit crapping in it. I couldn’t care less.
As for streaming TV, I refuse to watch Shogun because it has no Black or Hispanic characters, and evidnetly no LBGTQTTWTFGTFO characters. They should have DIEd.
Instead of this Godzilla, did you see the $15 million buck semi-masterpiece Godzilla Minus 1? Literate and historically adventurous.
Tried to, but the timing didn’t work out and it left theaters before I got a chance. I mention that in the review.
I know the difference, but sometime my hand forgets…
AH! Too bad, Lawrence. But streaming soon if not already.
I very much enjoyed Godzilla Minus 1 — for instance, the title’s meaning is obscure until the very end! I don’t know if I saw it on a medium or big screen (I was dealing with degraded vision from hormone problems then, so I merely sat close to the screen.) But it was well attended and people enjoyed the journey, like me!
SORRY: I didn’t finish on first read to learn you had tried to see it. So I shared my reaction, knowing that saving your piece later on my iPad was needed (not the Android phone of my first posting); I am a film historian interested in tracking Hollywood decline indicators (cf, the billion buck pics by year, from Howard, posted above.)
Have you come across any comparison of the two Godzilla flick (A throaty “GWAWD-ZZZZILA” There is a charming intensity to Japanese pronunciation of this SF icon’s name. For me, it was a definite enhancement that stayed with me, and I cannot imagine this second go-round has it down like that! Got to feel like a kid again with it. Old visual and visceral memories made over, anew!
@Joe Bagadonuts. No shit. And guess where it all started? Hollywood. It’s like a petri dish for the most vile and calamitous man-made flesh-eating cultural pathogens to mutate and spread to the world at large. Metaphorically but maybe actually, some seriously dark forces inhabit that community and these stars do some kind of deal-with-the-devil to make their bones there. Since they’re not from there their exo-SoCal genetics don’t realize the den of vipers they’ve surrounded themselves with and their kids turn into goblins just like the rest of them.
They’re kids are not alright. And you just know as they smile and say how proud they are.
X7C00. About Korean film and series? Are they the BEST?
For eight months of Covid in 2021, I was stuck in a very international backpackers Hostel near two universities in Auckland, New Zealand, until border exiting air travel opened up.
The video theater was our major, and well shared, entertainment at this Hostel. Our consensus was that — yes, indeed!— the Korean output is best, but sometimes Japanese films and series are competitive, too! Both, more reliable than Hollywood films being done now.
I befriended a university computer science teacher from Pakistan, completing his PhD in AI in NZ. Thus, we spent a lot of time sampling and enjoying films on that theme.
Our quest? Answers to: How will AI and robots change our world? I think I liked the Russian wife-like bot series, “Better Than Us” (2018-19, 15 hours/episodes, I think) better than he did because I found myself re-watching a slew of later episodes, as the plot lines thickened.
On, Netflix, there was “Biohackers” (2020), a German 5 part series set in Freiburg at the University, with a noir plot played out against cutting edge genetic engineering science. I loved it! But I couldn’t find anyone else that agreed with my high esteem. It did generate a sequel with a few episodes (3, I think) the next year, which — as expected — was at least one step (or Star rating) down for the original.
With a cynical local photographer, we agreed that “Dark Web: Cicada 3301”
was the most inspired and best film of 2021. It concerns a computer hacker who is dragged before the FISA court to answer an IC investigation. Now, FISA court is a secret court; that premise works. But that they do inquiries and face cross examinations there are both untrue — but it’s a very fun conceit for the film.
Because Auckland was only intermittently shut down by Covid (and the country, almost never), I was also delighted to help a middle-aged Indian woman finish her first screenplay, the final project for a Masters degree in screenwriting.
Her prof’s one requirement was that it had to be a story that’s set in New Zealand, at least in part. Therefore she chose a mid-life romance. A divorced woman from India in NZ, who goes back to the old Portuguese port-colony, Goa, to deal with her family past and test herself with a new man — after an semi-arranged coupling proves too stilted and routine to endure — or maybe not! An excellent first-hand theme for her MA.
Although she had done a Masters in English in India, and a Masters in literature and linguistics at Cambridge in England, this third post-grad degree hurdle, she explained, was her most difficult one ever. I was glad to play on her team for an assist.
On the South Island, the town of Dunedin substituted for Montana, in after the turn of the 20th century West for filming “Year of The Dog.” (Jane Campion directed, I think.)
And I learned that my Doppelgänger is character actor Gary Busey. “I know who you are…! I’d get from strangers on the street, and “love yer work!” from 20-somethings throughout my stay in New Zealand. (LOL!) And it was difficult for most to believe otherwise.
Well, what can I say? Hollywood stars do frequent NZ, and Aucklanders identify more with Los Angeles than anywhere else in the US.
[…] It’s so bad that even Hollywood regulars who tick all the proper intersectionality boxes are being laid off. Quel dommage! Here’s a Critical Drinker round-table on the subject. Read More > at Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog […]