How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?

The Academy Awards ceremony, which this year will take place on March 10, traditionally provides a reliable moment of optimism for a perennially anxious industry. The Oscars are the climax of an awards season that’s a prolonged exercise in collective congratulation, and in early March the rest of the year still looks bright. The Sundance Film Festival and its attendant bidding wars have wrapped up, offering nothing but promise and excitement. At the box office, the biggest bets of the year have typically not yet opened and thus have not yet bombed. Every unreleased movie on the schedule might yet be a great one. Every year feels as if it just might be the biggest year ever.

But not this year.

For Hollywood, 2023 was not so much a disaster as a preview of disasters to come. Sure, one of the big stories last year was the Barbenheimer phenomenon — two celebrated hits that marched arm in arm toward a combined 21 Oscar nominations — but everywhere else you look, the prognosis is grim.

The industry, still staggering back from the pandemic shutdowns, was hit with twin strikes that brought production to a halt for six months. Writers, actors and virtually the rest of Hollywood’s work force were united in animus against the studio bosses, who, in their refusal to cut necessary deals, blithely cast themselves in the role of supervillain. That fury persists: Each new headline about the huge compensation package for Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, or decisions by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, to shelve entire projects for tax write-offs undergirds a prevailing narrative that the people who finance the movies are becoming the enemies of the people who make them.

All of this is happening as the industry seems to be realizing in unison that streaming services — those wondrous platforms that were going to carry the town into the future like magic carpets — maybe aren’t a panacea after all. And hanging over all this anger and anxiety is the menace of artificial intelligence, which threatens every human part of the creative food chain, from the writers who pen scripts to the actors whose faces fill the screens to, theoretically, the studio executives whose jobs are piloting hits.

The year 2023 was a time of downsizing, diminishment, shelving, sidelining, retrenching, retreating and bet-hedging. And 2024 is the year of consequences. The plain fact is that, thanks to the strikes, there simply aren’t enough movies and new shows in the pipeline to give the business the boom year it badly needs. (This weekend’s big opening, “Dune: Part Two,” was delayed from its original 2023 premiere date because of the strikes’ disruption.) For Hollywood, it will take at least a full year for the supply lines to start flowing at capacity again — and there are fewer supply lines than there used to be. Only five of the legacy movie companies still operate as traditional studios, and one of those, Paramount, is up for sale.

As for new projects, the industry’s current whispered motto seems to be: Just survive till ’25. Writers and producers pitching projects are being warned to keep expectations at basement level: Nobody’s buying, everybody’s cutting costs, caution rules, and the boom times are over. To quote Tony Soprano — the main character in a hit show back when a golden age seemed to be dawning, not dimming — things are trending downward. He had no idea how prescient he was.