One of the basic but false expectations people have in democracies is that they get to vote on the things that could change their lives forever. Nothing happens, we think, that reorders the lives of millions of people all at once without some sort of referendum or election.
Things have never really worked that way, of course. And for a few generations now — since the advent of modern technology and in particular, the Internet — that has become more and more evident. What happens, in practice, is that some new technology arrives, and all at once, life changes forever for countless people. In one generation, watching a movie meant driving down to the theater and buying a ticket in person. It meant putting on clothes and interacting with other human beings. No alternative was imaginable. And then, just a few years later, watching a movie became as simple as sitting inside your house and pressing a few buttons on a remote, or yelling commands at it like some sort of schizophrenic. It becomes archaic to think of anything else.
We’re all used to this kind of rapid social change at this point. These massive shifts happen before anyone studies what effects these new technologies might have on our brains and interpersonal relationships. The changes just happen, and very quickly, we all take them for granted. That’s all very familiar.
What’s not familiar is what happens when there’s a rollback on all of this. What happens when a modern convenience, for one reason or another, suddenly stops?
As of this week, that’s no longer a hypothetical question. After screenwriters in Hollywood went on strike a few months ago, the Screen Actors Guild joined them on the picket line last Friday. The combined strike means that, for all intents and purposes, the entertainment industry in the United States has shut down. The strike affects movies, television shows, video games, and more. It’s the first time this kind of strike has happened in more than six decades. In our online world of Netflix, Hulu, and Xbox Live, this is unprecedented, and for some people, terrifying.
For journalists in corporate media — who spend more time glued to screens than anyone on the planet — this is an extinction-level event. This is a catastrophe approximately on the scale of a Texas-sized asteroid hitting the Earth. These journalists didn’t care much about the explosion of that Russian gas pipeline, even though that might have started a world war. They didn’t care about the strange disappearance of that 9-1-1 call from Jeffrey Epstein’s jail the night he died, even though that raised a lot of questions about corruption at the highest levels of the federal government. Journalists didn’t bother to panic over any of that. But a strike in Hollywood? They’re all over that story. For example, the Associated Press just published this dire headline:
“Hollywood plunges into all-out war on the heels of pandemic and a streaming revolution.”
That sounds serious. And according to the allegedly venerable Sunday show “Face the Nation” on CBS, it is quite serious. “Face the Nation” just invited the former CEO of Paramount, Barry Diller, to explain the fallout of the ongoing strikes in Hollywood. Here’s what the Hollywood shutdown means for you, according to Barry Diller:
The SAG-AFTRA strike will have "devastating effects" if it's not settled by Christmas, IAC and Expedia Chair Barry Diller says, telling @margbrennan "there doesn't seem to be enough trust and energy to get it settled soon." pic.twitter.com/s0HgceAZD2
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 16, 2023
The former Paramount CEO wants you to know that “what will happen is, if in fact, it doesn’t get settled until Christmas or so, then, next year, there’s not going to be many programs for anybody to watch.”
Do you hear that? Are you trembling in fear yet? There might not be any more programs for you to watch next year! The programs are going away! Think of the programs! What will you do without the programs?
It’s kind of funny when you think about it. The implication, conveyed with total sincerity, is that it would be somehow a bad thing if people stopped staring at screens for 10 hours a day and actually went outside, got some exercise, and maybe developed real human interests and personalities. Barry Diller is assuming that you’ll agree with him on that point as if it’s a given. If people went outdoors and got some sun, Diller fears, then one thing might lead to the next, and after a while, they might actually think and interact with each other. Their testosterone levels might even go up. We simply can’t have that.
What Diller said is interesting — not because he’s worth listening to, but because his desperation is obvious. Diller, and the rest of Hollywood, want to make sure you’re always consuming content on one subscription service or another. These people never pause to consider whether the content they’re forcing down your gullet is good or worthwhile; whether it helps you to be a smarter, better, more interesting person; or whether it makes your life better. They never ask themselves if people actually want to watch and listen to the slop they’re putting on these streaming services, and in movie theaters. They just expect you’ll be horrified at the prospect that the morphine-drip of content has been shut down.
Unfortunately for these executives, there have been a lot of data points that contradict that theory in recent months. Look at the pathetic box office returns of the new “The Flash” movie, or the “Mission Impossible” sequel, or the “Indiana Jones” and “Little Mermaid” catastrophes. All of these failures reveal that people are growing weary of what Hollywood is producing. They are exhausted by it. Bored of it. The numbers make it clear.
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For example, “The Flash” had a budget of roughly $220 million, and as of the latest estimates, it’s barely broken even. The latest “Indiana Jones” film cost around $300 million, and made about as much in the global box office. It’s a wash. The latest “Mission Impossible” movie, meanwhile, had a budget of around $300 million, and as of today, it has made less than $250 million.
These kinds of consistent shortfalls for big-budget films are unheard of in Hollywood. It’s bomb after bomb after bomb. So, what’s going on here? What possibly could explain these numbers?
Rather than confront that question honestly, corporate media is rushing to blame — can you guess? — COVID.
According to the AP:
“Disaster … loomed in Hollywood when COVID-19 in March 2020 shuttered movie theaters, emptied TV studios and shut down all production. The recovery is still ongoing. … Box office remains about 20-25% off the pre-pandemic pace.”
In other words, by the media’s telling, the problem isn’t the content of these Hollywood movies. It’s not that people are tired of woke propaganda, derivative storylines, or franchises that tell the same story repeating itself ad nauseam and never coming to a conclusion. The problem is that more than three years ago, COVID happened. The same excuse that the government used to fundamentally change the election system in this country, is also the same excuse that explains why no one is watching Hollywood movies anymore.
That’s a pretty pat explanation. Is it true? Let’s see: if that explanation made any sense whatsoever, you’d expect that every movie, regardless of genre, would be having similar problems. You’d expect that viewers would be tuning out across the board.
But that’s not what’s happening. Not even close. The film “Sound of Freedom,” which tells a true story about a hero who rescued sex trafficked children, is currently pushing $100 million at the box office. Word-of-mouth is especially strong. The film’s audience in its second week in theaters grew by nearly 40%. “Sound of Freedom” managed to make all of that money, and build all of that buzz, on a shoe-string budget of less than $15 million. Somehow the “pandemic” from three years ago didn’t cut into their revenues. How is that possible? When all is said and done, “Sound of Freedom” will likely earn something like 10 times its production budget. To put that into perspective, for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” to earn 10 times its production budget, it would need to make $3 billion at the box office. And, to put it simply, that ain’t happening.
As it happens, it’s not just “Sound of Freedom” that’s reaching a large audience on a small budget. The Christian horror film “Nefarious” managed to make it into the box office top ten despite basically no marketing, no budget, and no stars. “Nefarious” came out at the same time as “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” and it still managed to beat expectations. There’s many more examples. Also this year, my own documentary “What Is A Woman?” became arguably the most viewed documentary of all time, again with very little marketing compared to something like “Indiana Jones” or “Mission Impossible.” What explains all this?
The answer is that people are still interested in films. The pandemic hasn’t changed that, no matter what the Associated Press and Hollywood executives tell you. What has changed is that people have grown tired of Hollywood. Mainstream films are redundant, hollow, and blatantly politicized. The industry is entirely out of ideas, and it treats its customers with contempt. That’s what’s really underpinning the crisis. And it’s why, despite what the panicked executives and journalists will tell you, the collapse of the mainstream entertainment industry would be no tragedy. It’s a necessary step in the process of creating something sustainable — an industry that produces content people actually want to watch. And that industry is coming, whether Hollywood executives and screenwriters want it or not.