It is amazing how much of a difference a year makes.
The reality of Hollywood is that things will never go back to the way they were before the strikes. Those days are gone forever.
What is fascinating to me about this entire situation is we see the technological disruption happening right before our eyes. Actually, never have I seen an industry implode in real time like this one. At this point, the pace is much faster than the automotive sector.
Movie studios are in trouble. People are out of jobs. Projects are cancelled. executives are running out off options.
The entire industry is collapsing. There simply is no way to sugarcoat this.
Image generated by Ideogram
Reality TV On The Decline
During the strike, it was believe that reality television would excel.
To start, these shows do not have unionized actors. On top of that, it tends to be less scripted than regular programming. This led many to believe that studios would turn to this genre.
Instead, the exact opposite is happening.
Reality television is on the decline and jobs are scarce.
The ensuing “Hollywood horror Happy Hour” (tagline: “We’re All broke. Let’s Laugh About It!”), which took place May 21, was just one sign of the times in the nonfiction TV business. Jobs are scarce, budgets are crunched, workers are considering jumping ship and executives seem terrified to take creative risks on untested concepts. This has come as a surprise to some insiders in the space. There was an initial expectation that the 2023 actors and writers strikes would accelerate activity in reality TV, which boomed during the 2007-08 writers strike, but many say the opposite occurred — even though nonfiction, being relatively cheap to produce and largely nonunion, is a natural stopgap for entertainment companies during work shutdowns.
Unfortunately, the ones affected are people we never heard of. Ben Affleck and J-Lo might battle over their multi-million dollar divorce but neither will fret about paying the bills. The same is true for most of the household names.
For the rest, it is a tough time. Even experience is no protection.
For the waiting workforce, development and production haven’t picked up much since then. “I’ve worked in this industry for 20 years, and all of a sudden the faucet just turned off,” says producer Patrick Caligiuri (Naked and Afraid, American Idol), who has posted multiple times to his TikTok since March about the struggles of entertainment workers. (His first post, emblazoned “Reality TV is dead,” took off on LinkedIn, racking up over 2,000 likes and nearly 300 comments.)
The forecast that non-fiction (aka reality) television was going to explode ended up being wrong. These shows are being axed like everything else.
“It’s not just people who just moved to L.A. to get into the business that can’t find jobs,” adds one veteran reality TV producer. “It’s somebody who’s been working for 25 years and has a résumé that I would kill for who’s saying they haven’t worked in a year.”
How long will these people hold on? The reality for the reality television business is that it is likely time to move on. For many, this means entering a completely new industry.
Paramount Firing Staff
The flip side of this is the studios.
Paramount, one of the studios that was in the crapper was just bought out. It comes as no surprise that layoffs are on tap.
Paramount Global has initiated the next phase of its plan to lay off 15% of its U.S. workforce, saying the cuts will be 90% complete after further cutbacks today.
This is not long after the company simply eliminated its entire television division. The company decided to close up shop in a single week.
Paramount, along with Warner Bros, were forced to take huge write downs on their traditional broadcast assets. It appears that traditional television simply does not have the value it once did.
Once again, this is not really a surprise.
The fragmentation of media is well underway. Eyeballs have a lot more options as compared to a couple decades ago. As we repeatedly cite, the success of YouTube is coming at the expense of someone.
That someone is Hollywood.
Many believe things will bounce back. On this I disagree. We are actually in the middle of two technological ways.
What we are witnessing now is the first wave: the disruption of the distribution of video content. That was a monopoly which was broken by the Internet and is only now hitting its stride.
The next wave will be AI, which is going to seriously affect the creation of content. Couple that with even further fragmentation of the distribution, and we can see how centralized entities are going to suffer even more.
We are watching this in real time.