Hollywood is DOOOOMED

Again

Jun 02, 2025

Hundreds of people have not asked me, “John, what do you think of the state of the movie/TV industry? Is this the new normal, what with jobs down 40-plus percent, or are we seeing a transition to something different?”

And I say:

Why are you asking me? If I knew, I’d be making money on this shit.

Tell you, I’ve been working in Hollywood in one form or another since my arrival in L.A., thirty years ago (brrr), and never ONCE has anyone said, “Y’know, Hollywood is in a perfectly stable place right now, this is all normal and expected.”

No, since the day I showed up, it’s been people shaking their heads and stubbing out their cigarettes and sweating and saying with glistening red eyes, “I dunno, man, Hollywood’s in a weird place lately…”

After the first ten years, I started to catch on.

It’s that “Nobody knows anything” thing Goldman taught us, if Hollywood was predictable, more people would be capitalizing on it. It’s always been a giant roulette wheel, but instead of pure, random chance, it all depends on the taste of the audience.

Which, honestly, might as well be a giant roulette wheel.

You know that expression, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans?” Well, Hollywood is what happens while people are busy planning how to make money. A shit-ton of lucky accidents, that allow thousands of us little people to make a living.

Sometimes.

Anyway, so people are writing articles by the dozens about how Hollywood is DOOMED, DOOOOOOOOOMED, and sure, maybe this time it’s the real thing.

But I wonder.

(And I’m not just being cavalier here, I say this as someone who very likely will be part of the fallout. I haven’t worked year-round in editing for almost two years now, the tightest job market since I started. Maybe I’m one of those that has to recalibrate, and my time in Hollywood is done. It happens. Silent film actors lost their spots to actors with better voices; some caught up, some didn’t, and were forgotten.

So when I say people might be forgotten, I’m talking about people like me. I’m not just being a detached cynical douchebag, promise.)

Thing is, every time a media is written off, the death knell sounded, people start turning toward the next big thing… and yet, that old media refuses to die. TV was going to kill movies in the 1950s. Kill them dead. And yet, for a corpse, movies are still making a decent paycheck.

And what’s the most popular entertainment right now? Short videos, little disposable bursts of entertainment, almost like…

… the penny-slot kinetoscopes and nickelodeons of the late 19th century.

Yes, I realize it’s different, they’ve evolved, but it’s the same basic unit of distribution. What’s old is new again.

As it was many times for movies, declared dead after the Western and Musical audiences turned on them, as it was for TV, once considered so banal that many people bragged on not owning a TV, so their minds couldn’t be corroded by such nonsense.

And yet, TVs still exist, and make big money. As do movies.

As does live freakin’ theatre, fer cryin out loud. Talk about a thing humankind certainly doesn’t require, and yet, would you wanna live in a world without “Hamilton?”

People declare Hollywood dead about once every five minutes. If you pay attention, those people yelling it the loudest usually have stock in the NEXT big thing.

Sound like anyone you know? That AI tech bro jumping up and down, telling you how awesome it is to watch slo-mo shorts made entirely from 1s and 0s, and yet, those shorts are less interesting than an old “Our Gang” hundred-plus year old silent film?

Again, I say this as a guy probably going to lose his career to AI. And yet, I don’t know anybody, kid, tween, teen, adult, anybody, who really is full-on boner excited to see an AI movie, just because it’s AI. They’d rather watch a real human eat a pile of dirt on YouTube.

Sure, there will come a day when someone FINALLY produces a well-made, intelligent, beautiful piece of art with A.I. I’ve written about that, I believe it’s inevitable.

But that already happened in animation. Animation produced movies and TV that no movie at the time could duplicate with actors and cameras. Pixer regularly hits the emotions and heartstrings of people with stunning success rates. People have taken to shitting on Pixar and Disney recently, but at least half of Pixar’s movies are considered among the ranks of the best movies ever made.

And yet, animation is still considered a subset of movies. It didn’t become the default. It didn’t wash away the rest of cinema. Even though animation could show dragons, spaceships, dinosaurs, magic, infinity, the inside of a butthole, you name it, before most movies and TV could even get close, it didn’t become the sole storytelling engine. People still wanted to see other people in front of the camera, for whatever reason. Animation has gotten dangerously close to duplicating humans in a lot of instances, and yet… animated movies have only been nominated for Best Picture a few times.

Not only did animation not replace “real” movies, even though it could do things “real” movies couldn’t, it remained and still remains a somewhat niche market, mostly considered a kids’ thing, even though some of the best stories ever told, and I mean since gotdamn Shakespeare and the Bible, have been animated.

Maybe I’m naive. Or, being generous, optimistic. Entertainment goes in waves. I mean, you didn’t imagine it, there was about twenty years there when every TV show was competing to be the smartest, best show you’ve ever seen. It produced stuff that still hasn’t been beaten for sheer quality. It’s not like we couldn’t still have that, every show better than the next.

But the audience apparently shifted enough that “quality TV” just isn’t worth pursuing anymore, and “pretty good TV” is good enough. That it’s more important to have stuff you can have on in the background whilst you wartch TikTok.

I guess what I’m ultimately saying is, that it’s probably a good sign that “Max” is putting the “HBO” back in their name.