Is Hollywood Dead? Yes … and No

Justine Bateman has written an op-ed for Fast Company proclaiming Hollywood is dead. It is a very well written piece that is hard to refute. She’s mostly talking about how films and art became “content,” and the threat of AI on the horizon. She writes of the old days of Hollywood:

I’ll tell you what it was like, up to the last era of Hollywood. There was a high concentration of talented artists. There was enough room for everyone who had the luck, the determination, and the talent. Room for new actors, directors, and writers to come into the established business. There was a place for the Farrah Fawcetts and the Sir Lawrence Oliviers. 

There were Gatekeepers, Tastemakers, and Kingmakers. Up through the gatekeeping and tastemaking filters, these talents would emerge. Time would be taken to promote their work and their image. Careful decisions would be made to maintain the quality of their output. And new arrivals paid respect to those who were already here, those who had built the business up for these newcomers to flourish.  

I agree with Bateman, as I’ve written many times here, but I think this is only part of the story. I’ve been covering the Oscars for 25 years now, as most of you know. I started in 1999 just as the internet was taking flight. We colonized it and turned it into a new world, a utopia of good people doing good things all under the Obama administration.

Right around 2003, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter franchises hit theaters. They not only made absurd amounts of money, they were also part of the Oscar conversation. You can see from that point how the box office returns went and why they went that way.

Part of it is has to do with a generation raised on branded products. My daughter’s childhood was all about brands. My Little Pony, Marvel, etc. We turned into fandoms or tribes based on the kinds of brands we trusted and became loyal to. Movies then became brands. They built whole communities — fan bases — on those brands, Marvel and Star Wars being the biggest.

Here is the chart from Box Office Mojo:

Where the box office now, as you can see, is right around 1998 – prior to the franchise/branded boom. Gladiator II might tick it up a notch, maybe Wicked (I worry about that one) but we’re still in the doldrums from where we were before.

Why? It’s easy. Hollywood went “woke” and that destroyed its brand. This is easy to track. I’ve written about it many times before.

Here is a quick summary:

Hollywood diverged down two separate paths starting around 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency. Think of it like Coach vs. First Class. Coach = “let them eat Marvel” — first class = The Oscar race.

That’s how you get to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which made no money, beating Jim Cameron’s Avatar which made all the money. It was okay, though, because the franchise side of Hollywood needed the “quality” stamp of approval of the Oscars. At some point, the Oscars no longer drove the box office and vice-versa.

Now, it’s ridiculous – a movie like CODA can win with barely anyone having seen it. The industry is a bubble onto itself. If the public no longer matters, the box office no longer matters.

But that’s the problem. The public does matter and the box office does matter. That’s the only way to have a thriving film and Oscar industry. What’s the point of any of it otherwise?

What happened to both of these two paths is that throughout the Obama presidency, Critical Race Theory began spreading in public schools and universities. They essentially indocrinated students and raised a generation of “social justice warriors.” They came of age roughly in the year 2020 – had their massive protests in the Summer of that year, and essentially overtook all institutions of government and culture, including Hollywood.

Remember the documentary about Evergreen College? When I first saw it I remember thinking how terrifying it was to even talk about it. And yet, to understand what happened to Hollywood requires one understand what happened to the generation that now has Hollywood by the balls.

A rigid, puritanical, fanatical movement overtook the Left, using social media and media to enact a tribunal wherein anyone could be called out and publicly humiliated, with their lives and careers ruined. We went through it for years and years until we arrived in 2020.

At that point, those at the top – the people who run the corporations and movie studios — decided to protect themselves. To do that, they had to implement diversity mandates that policed art to force it to align with their new doctrine.

To my great disappointment and personal horror, almost everyone I know from publicists to filmmakers to bloggers to journalists all buckled under the pressure, all became crippled with fear and all went along with it. I did not. I defied it at every turn, as those of you who have been reading this site now. Sooner or later, they were going to come for me, and they finally did (thanks Rebecca Keegan).

Show trials in the Soviet Union and during the Cultural Revolution existed to control dissent. When we see how other people are treated it makes us more fearful of the same thing happening to us. Accuse lest ye be accused. But it has had an extremely detrimental trickle down effect on Hollywood. No one wants to be called out, especially not the people at the top.

So what do they do? They PANDER. They continue to virtue signal through casting choices and infused dogma in almost every movie, from super hero franchise movies on down to indies. When a non-woke movie drops I am always stunned and amazed. Like Sean Baker’s Anora. It tells a story. It isn’t telling you how to think. For that alone it deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Another movie like that is Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. It tells a story. It doesn’t tell you how to think. It could have but it never does.

The problem with Hollywood movies of late is what Critical Drinker calls THE MESSAGE. It goes something like this — we in Hollywood believe we have THE ANSWER and now we’re going to instruct you on how you should see the world, masculinity, sexuality, issues of race. The themes are all the same – they reflect the platform of the Democratic Party and express only that point of view.

Abortion, climate change, immigration, Trump hate – it all says exactly the same thing and in exactly the same way. As I’ve said many times, the alignment of power between culture and government means that once one begins to fall, all will eventually fall. That’s what is happening now as we watch the pendulum swing from the extreme Left to the Right.

When Hollywood “god religion,” they wanted to share it with their audiences and that meant when their films flopped they blamed their audiences for not wanting what Hollywood wanted them to want. Women in the role of traditional men. Race swapping for no real reason except to virtue signal.

How can they fix it? It’s easy. Just remove the guardrails. Stop firing people for speaking out and being honest. Stop firing people because they vote in a way you don’t like or believe something you don’t agree with. Hire the best – the best writers, directors and actors and stop worrying about ticking the boxes to ensure maximum woke wish fulfillment.

Can Hollywood do that? I think if Trump wins the election it will cause the empire to finally collapse in a way that allows for free thought and free expression to return. If he doesn’t, it will take longer but it’s only moving in one direction. Art will out.

One reason AI is flourishing is that the woke rules don’t apply on YouTube. Anyone can make any movie without having to worry about if all the leads are too white, lest be called “white supremacists” or racists.

Example:

It isn’t that they’re aiming for white or not white, it’s that it doesn’t matter in that world. It is infinite. People can create whatever they want. In Hollywood and on the Left there is this idea that we have to project a totally equal society. That is their driving impulse. Every story they tell has to get back to that fundamental truth otherwise they’re done for.

Journalists, bloggers, artists, writers and actors should stop genuflecting to the fanatics and start speaking honestly and truthfully, whenever possible.

But until Hollywood abandons their new code, and until they stop pandering to activists and canceling people they will continue to collapse and hand the future to content and AI. Only humans can tell great stories but they can’t tell them with their balls in a vice.