The Problems in Hollywood

It ain't just theater that's facing a change in audience behavior

I just listened to the latest episode of Atlantic writer Derek Thompson’s podcast Plain English entitled “How Hollywood Drove Its Business Model Off a Cliff.” Thompson interviews Julia Alexander, the director of strategy for Parrot Analytics and a writer with Puck News about “the ongoing troubles in the entertainment industry, including the strikes, the box office recession, and more.” By “entertainment industry,” they mean mostly TV. I can’t say I fully followed all of Alexander’s points, which were sometimes peppered with acronyms and business terminology that I only partly was able to parse, but generally speaking I found her analysis of the situation in Hollywood powerful and cogent. Things don’t look as great as they are sometimes painted.

I share it with you because one of the things that became increasingly clear as I listened is that, well, it isn’t only theater that is in crisis. While the narrative currently taking hold is that theater attendance this year is down 30% nationwide (I’m not totally certain where this figure comes from other than it’s been mentioned by a couple people connected with the larger struggling theaters), it appears that a similar seachange is occuring in television and movie spectatorship as well, both of which are seeing a similar dropoff in viewer numbers.

In other words, we seem to be in a broad transition in entertainment consumption that nobody seems to really have a grasp on yet. All that’s clear is that the old solutions aren’t working. Theater leaders should beware of grasping for the easy causation story taking hold about season selection or post-pandemic apathy and instead try to take a broader view of what we are seeing. It is entirely possible that this may be the new normal. I know slowing one’s roll is difficult for leaders to do when their theater is struggling for survival and they have to do something—anything!— quickly, and a few may temporarily attain some measure of financial stability by retreating toward safer, more commercial fare, but my intuition tells me that we are seeing something different. After all, Hollywood has been relying on the safety of franchise films for a while (Thompson provides a rather mortifying list at the top of the podcast, each title followed by a number indicating what sequel it is), but especially this year interest seems to have fallen off a cliff. Could be the films just aren’t very good, but it could be something else entirely.

I don’t know what is happening, and I suspect none of the major players do either. They all sound simultaneously bewildered and panicked, not unlike the theater leaders. I suspect they will try throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see if anything sticks, and maybe something will. As I write this, the Barbie and the Oppenheimer films seem to have attracted more interest than had been usual lately—does that mean people are done with franchises and want original films? If so, my understanding is that Barbie is the first of quite a few movies based on Mattel toys, so we may be seeing the birth of another franchise—they might want to rethink that! Oppenheimer is likely sui generis, but is it a model? Doubtful. Or does it mean those two films had huge marketing budgets that generated buzz? We’ll see. Regardless, from Thompson’s and Alexander’s analysis, I gather that the problems are more systemic and aren’t something that a couple hit films can solve.

Again, my knowledge of the film world is minimal to say the least. All I can say is that the shift in audience behavior described rang a bell for this theater historian.