The Hollywood Reshuffle

...and what it tells me.

Watching the streaming services and studios constantly reshuffle, raise their rates, and attack their audiences on social media, while continuously canceling and greenlighting new shows, over the past few years, has led me to a few conclusions which I freely admit I could be wrong about. If anything I have to say about it seems to lack context, I recommend this video. (Warning: The humor in it is NSFW.)

1 - The Entertainment business, at least when it comes to what people watch on all manner of screens, is no longer as profitable as it used to be, under the Hollywood model. The studio's solution to this has been to spend more money and roll out more content faster than anyone can possibly consume it. As a result, most shows lose money and can only exist because the very few successes on VOD or in theaters make up the difference. However, the ship is still sinking.

2 - Most content doesn't have a large enough audience to justify what's spent on producing it and as a whole, the amount of content that is substandard in storytelling, uniqueness, and brand recognition (whether it be new and uninspired, or old and worn out) is so great that the effect on audiences is apathy inducing oversaturation. The audiences that do cling to these shows, often apologizing or arguing for their mediocrity are too small to sustain them and often themselves drive away the rest of any potential audience. To put it bluntly, not enough people want to watch hours and hours of trash that waists their time and insults their intelligence, only to then be degraded for rejecting it. Most showrunners these days write their series or movies like it's their Twitter feed because they no longer or never did know how to communicate any other way. The result is forgettable, meandering stories without focus, that nobody wants to pay to suffer through. When a show actually hits the mark and becomes a moneymaker, it's often attacked much in the same way as the story of The Scorpion and the Frog, wherein a frog offers to transport a scorpion safely across a river only to be stung halfway through the journey, causing them both to die.

3 - Studios are desperate but seem to be too scared to do what is needed to pull themselves out of their multi-billion-dollar tailspin. Admittedly, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The amount of goodwill outreach towards fans, downsizing, and purging of toxic/talentless hires that they previously spent nation-sized budgets facilitating would be a tacit admission of complete failure. They'd be attacked from all sides and completely annihilated. Audiences would be vindicated and spend their money elsewhere, the mass of self-righteous/untalented people Hollywood invited into a sort of entertainment sharecropping scam would revolt, and the investors who spent billions of dollars only to see their diminishing returns get smaller and smaller would have no choice but to fire every last studio head, leaving them with nowhere to jump ship to. The industry would have to be completely restructured and rebuilt from the ground up, which most likely, nobody knows how to do.

4 - This is a huge opportunity to build something from the ground up, outside of Hollywood. All of the above has left a vacuum in entertainment that has yet to be filled. However, so far, almost no one wants to try it because every time they get a monochrome of success, they think it's their opportunity to jump to Hollywood and get that big money. Granted, there still is money there but the chances of a person seeing a return on their investment of passion, time, and cash are pretty much zero. They haven't yet let go of the memory of what the entertainment industry once was and believe that pursuing it is still a tenable business decision more assured than betting on themselves. I would argue that the people who focus on what Hollywood has failed to acknowledge can begin to incrementally structure a model that will be profitable and produce quality entertainment, that retains the same cultural value that has since been stripped from the franchises we once believed would stand forever as institutions. The combination of affordable technology in all areas of production and distribution has made it possible to cater to niche audiences on micro budgets, taking chances with new formats in time, styles, and stories, with nominal risk of losses and greater potential of a return. New IPs owned outside of dense and all-consuming corporate contracts mean that creators can continue to see a return on their catalogs of movies and series, without as many people taking a cut, over a long-term period, rather than just upon release.

The biggest issue I see with independent filmmakers and production companies is that they still plan their projects and fantasies of success around the idea of achieving big-time fame and making Hollywood money. While there will always be people in the mainstream system who will do just that, the chances of it happening for most filmmakers is the same as winning the lottery, which is why it's not a worthy goal. It will just serve to distract from the good money they could be making by cultivating and nurturing an audience they know at a cost they can afford, building their own space to bigger and better heights.  

As far as my feelings for Hollywood go, I take no pleasure in seeing that it’s become, nor do I want to see it fail. I believe that there’s a space for everyone in a healthy and competitive market. Indeed competition fosters creativity and better art. I sincerely hope the mainstream industry can find solutions to the issues that are currently crippling it.

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