Hollywood Getting Woke, and becoming Irrelevant

With statistics. I like statistics, and people like charts, because it is easy to see what is going on. From Roy Price: 2022 State of Media Year End Thoughts

And when you look at the charts, it seems that something happened to Hollywood in 2016. (Can you guess what that is?) The work in progress didn't impact 2017 much, but by 2018 you can start to see the impact.

Roy Price is (or at least was) a Hollywood insider.

Roy Price is a former Amazon executive who, over 13 years at Amazon, founded Amazon Video and Amazon Studios; is a former Disney executive; and is a former McKinsey consultant. Roy has developed 16 patented technologies, and his developed television series have won 12 Best Series awards from the Golden Globes and Emmys. Roy is from Los Angeles.

Mr. Price took a look at some interesting data around the shows coming out of the likes of Netflix and Disney in the past few years. First he identifies ...

The 10 biggest business issues in Hollywood:

1. Interest rates are up! No one cares about your imaginary earnings in year ten. Investors want profits now. Shift from growth to profitability!
2. The rapid decline of pay tv (66% of homes now)
3. The apparent saturation of SVOD at least in the most lucrative markets
4. The still bad state of theatrical (despite Top Gun, -34% vs 2019)
5. The growth of TikTok and YouTube

...

(You have to click thru for the rest!)

It is hard to measure the objective quality of a movie or TV show, so Mr. Price uses the IMDB score as that is what we have to work with. If not objective quality, it certainly measures the perceived quality of TV and movies by the intended audience. If you look at the number of shows that received a rating of 8 or better, that went from 20 in 2017, to 9 in 2021, and hit 1 in 2020, though you can blame that on COVID. You can't blame 2021 for that. If you look just at Netflix shows that received a rating of 8 or better on IMDB, the number fell from 8 in 2017 to 1 in 2021. It is almost as if something happened in 2016 or 2017 to change the way Hollywood created shows. Click thru for the graphs; they make the point pretty clearly.

Another self-evident issue no one talks about is that the shows and films are not connecting with audiences as they should be and used to. The number of new shows that audiences love has noticeably decreased in the past four years (-53%); meanwhile, the audience’s general connection to Hollywood seems to be diminishing — awards show viewership has fallen off the table 70%+. As Samuel Goldwyn said, “Include me out.”

Audience size - that likes the new shows - decreased by 53%. Gee, could they have done something to completely piss-off roughly half of the country?

There is more detail on all of the players including what might happen to their stock prices. (Hat tip to to Nerdrotic Nooner, in which this was discussed with Chris Gore.)

Why did I say that Hollywood was becoming irrelevant? Because you can only produce crap for so long, before you go out of business. The US Comic Book industry went Woke in 2005 or so, or that is when it started. Today they are irrelevant. One good Manga can outsell ALL of the mainstream US comic books in a month. Irrelevant. YouTube has made a lot of TV content creators irrelevant. The existence of decades of decent movies, a whole lot of which are either available for streaming or via DVD from my local library means I don't have to choose between Woke adventure movies and Woke SciFi and Woke Romantic Comedies. I can watch Casablanca, or the original Die Hard, or even cheesy stuff like the original Death Wish movies. And eventually, in the same way that people are creating independent comics, more independent movies will be created to fill the gap.

There was some hope of at lease one Hollywood studio waking up to the fact that what they have been doing is a giant pile of Fail. That was Warner Bros. Discovery. They recently announced, however, that they are going to turn their back on the biggest chance to make money in 2023 or 2024, a Superman Movie with Henry Cavil. And they may have no money to do much of anything anyway. Though there are rumors that Kathleen Kennedy is going to "leave" Lucasfilm and Disney. She is the person who took what was arguably the Greatest IP created by Hollywood, Star Wars, and turned it into a TV-show franchise that no one cares about. And it isn't clear that she can be called the biggest Woke failure in Hollywood, though she is definitely in the running for number 2.