00:08Hollywood is very much a factory town, and the widget that we make is entertainment.
00:14Across the board, everyone is creative, from the directors to the writers to craft service.
00:19Everyone has a talent.
00:21Some people come out here sort of on accident and find a place inside of the circus, and
00:27I think that some people are kind of called.
00:30Pilot season, upfronts, awards campaigns, Hollywood moves in cycles.
00:36But now, the cycles have slowed, a lot.
00:40It's a reset, and no one knows where the new baseline is.
00:44If you spoke to the average worker in Hollywood, you'd hear existential dread.
00:51And you've seen a pretty dramatic reduction in output, a lot of layoffs, fewer jobs.
00:58So it's just been a dark period.
01:00Los Angeles has visibly turned into what I would call a ghost town.
01:06Employment in California's motion picture industries peaked in 2016, but was decimated by the pandemic.
01:12And despite a surge in streaming, the actors' and writers' strikes meant a massive loss of
01:16jobs that show no sign of coming back.
01:20Big tech disruption, mega-mergers, and the looming threat of AI has left Hollywood in shambles.
01:26What are you doing?
01:26Get out of these people.
01:27Are you insane?
01:28I never thought this crap would happen in my lifetime.
01:31We're just in this inflection point right now where everything's converging.
01:34Not great economics, bad business models, audiences that are fragmented.
01:40Have they forgotten what a star looks like?
01:55I was just at a meeting on one of the lots.
01:58And to not be dodging around forklifts is astounding, the lack of production that's going on right
02:06now in Los Angeles.
02:09So here we are.
02:11We're inside of an empty soundstage, actually one of the larger ones.
02:16As you can see, production has left California.
02:20The numbers tell the story.
02:22Have a look at total L.A. shoot days for 2024.
02:26Now look at 2025.
02:28It's down over 16%.
02:31Compare this to 2016, when shoot days were at their recent peak.
02:36Some of it has gone to other states, but the majority of it has gone outside of the U.S.
02:42to places like the U.K., London, places like Australia, New Zealand, and other countries
02:48with more aggressive tax incentives.
02:50Goldman Sachs foreclosed on Radford Studios, a very famous film studio in Los Angeles, because
02:57it just wasn't making the payments on its debt.
03:00This is the story across the industry.
03:02And ultimately, the buck stops at the box office.
03:05The movie business is really in a long-term stagnation, at least in terms of cinemas.
03:11People aren't going out as much to the movies.
03:14The average American now goes to fewer than four movies a year.
03:17Just a decade ago, I think that was closer to five.
03:19Ticket sales were doing pretty good until, once again, COVID.
03:24And they never fully recovered, remaining nearly $3.5 billion lower than 2018.
03:31Sure, people don't leave the house anymore, but there's binge watching.
03:35That's got to be a bonanza, right?
03:38This was an industry that had a decade-long boom fueled by the arrival of streaming and
03:45the growth of new streaming services, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, followed by Disney.
03:49And Paramount Plus and HBO Max.
03:52The idea then was like, let's spend as much money as possible on movies and TV shows,
03:55so we can get as many customers and win this streaming battle.
04:01That came to a crashing halt in 2022.
04:06Everyone was losing billions of dollars.
04:08And then in 2023, you saw the strikes by actors and writers.
04:13Shut it down!
04:15And that was really a turning point because the studios figured out they could get by
04:19with a whole lot less.
04:21So they cut staff, they cut their spending on movies and TV shows.
04:25You're in bad shape.
04:35Yes, Hollywood is very fancy celebrities.
04:39There's a lot of very wealthy people who are very fabulous.
04:41But the people that I know, they are writers, they are producers, they're directors, they're
04:47grips and electricians.
04:48And they are trying to pay rent.
04:51And they're trying to keep food on the table.
04:54Actually, I brought my own slate.
04:56So, um...
04:57Oh.
04:58There.
04:59Mark.
04:59Yeah, that's okay.
05:00In the last 25 years, I've done production sound for everything from broadcast news to feature
05:07films.
05:07Check, check, check.
05:08And the Oscar goes to Whiplash.
05:11Thanks, Mike and Dave.
05:12I won the BAFTA and the Oscar for Best Sound Mixing for Whiplash.
05:19Compared to the heyday, things have gotten pretty bad.
05:23In 2025, I had 10 union days of work.
05:28You could say that I'm a canary in a coal mine because when sound people aren't working,
05:32it means that nobody's working.
05:36I'm a writer for television and movies.
05:39It's been very, very, very difficult.
05:42The industry you worked in changed fundamentally overnight.
05:45I've had to take a demotion and go back to working as an assistant.
05:49The level that I was at before, I became a staff writer.
05:55I went from being at the top of my career, and then all of a sudden the rug was pulled
06:00right out from underneath.
06:02Not just me, but everyone I know.
06:04And it's heartbreaking.
06:07I've had to take a lot of step backs.
06:10I work part-time at World Market.
06:15You know, I got a seasonal job there during Christmas, and thank God they decided to keep
06:19me.
06:20A lot of people are digging into their retirement savings who have to live.
06:28Amidst this ominous lack of work, major studios have been trending towards mega-mergers for
06:34their survival, which, needless to say, isn't helping.
06:37There's been one big deal after another.
06:40The companies that have done the big deals have generally suffered from a profitability
06:45perspective, but also just from a stock price perspective.
06:48And people are really worried about too much consolidation.
06:52Well, in my point of view, I lose a buyer.
06:55You look at Netflix, you look at Warner Brothers, you look at Paramount, you look at Fox.
06:59They're all buyers.
07:00While Warner Brothers can still run as Warner Brothers always ran, I'm losing places that
07:05I can take content to.
07:06And then, of course, you have job loss as well.
07:09Then you have studios restructuring.
07:11It's an ever-changing cycle.
07:14What's eating you?
07:16There's little doubt that the culprit behind all this change is tech.
07:25You have a camera in your pocket with a phone.
07:28All this editing software is cheaper than it used to be.
07:32And AI should only accelerate this because it's just going to be much easier for people
07:36to make stuff.
07:37There's more content being produced and released than ever before.
07:41We're all exhausted by it.
07:42And that puts a tremendous amount of power in the handful of platforms that have audiences.
07:47This is a profound period of change in an industry.
07:50It's not unlike maybe what newspapers have been through, radio.
07:55Tech comes in and they break these existing models that have worked for decades.
08:00It happened with Airbnb.
08:02It's happened with Uber.
08:04Money is flowing upward to a very concentrated point at the top.
08:07Everybody in the ecosystem, from the end user to the provider, ends up suffering.
08:12And that's what happened in Hollywood.
08:15You're under the age of 18 years old.
08:17The majority of what you watch is on TikTok and YouTube.
08:21YouTube owns over 13% of connected TV audience, which has grown year over year significantly.
08:27Let's have a closer look at the data.
08:29Here's Nielsen's numbers for how much TV time YouTube has been grabbing from the streamers
08:34between 2022 and 2025.
08:37Movies are no longer the center of Western culture.
08:42The way that they once were.
08:43I think that that's pretty evident and apparent in a lot of consumer behavior.
08:49The days of the A-list star system that carried the box office isn't tracking anymore.
08:55There's no longer like the gatekeepers of Hollywood.
09:00That's the beauty of the technology that we're in right now is like it kind of opened the aperture
09:04to allow anyone to create.
09:06Because some of those storytellers are so good, they're getting a lot of attention on YouTube.
09:12The good thing is you can publish anything you want.
09:14The bad thing is you're not being compensated for it.
09:17It is a massive grind in order to monetize that.
09:22For every Mr. Beast that's out there really crushing it, there's a million other creators
09:26that are never being seen.
09:27It's very lean in terms of how all these creators are actually getting stuff done.
09:32He said, hey, stop playing hero.
09:36Nurse, she's not even on staff here.
09:38One camera operator, one editor, maybe a production manager.
09:42There's no like sound person.
09:44There's no crew.
09:45And I think it's just, it's been a hard transition.
09:49And even these scaled down productions could go the way of the dodo.
09:54AI's ever-evolving image creation is poised to remove the need for sets, cameras, crews,
10:00even writers and actors.
10:01There is no way but force.
10:04I know a few managers that are driving Uber.
10:07I've been struggling with a plan, to be honest.
10:10Do I feel like this is the end of my career as an editor?
10:14I don't know.
10:19There is some light at the end of the tunnel, and that is content remains king.
10:25Even though big franchises still dominate worldwide revenue, smaller budget films are
10:30hitting a sweet spot in finding big audiences.
10:33The heart of the business will always be storytelling.
10:36So it's a struggle for the people who depend on these big budget movies, but really an opportunity
10:41for people who are creative and get creative about the tools they use.
10:45I believe that independent film is the beating heart of Hollywood.
10:49People are creating and they're making things, and there's movement.
10:52I am getting more business inquiries than I can keep up with right now.
10:56And to me, that indicates that people have a fire inside of them.
11:00They're not willing to let the business die.
11:02The shift isn't theoretical.
11:03Companies like A24, valued at $3.5 billion, have demonstrated that discipline budgets and
11:10bold storytelling can outperform the old studio playbook, turning indie films into box office
11:16wins and cultural touchstones.
11:18But studios are still doubling down on brand safety.
11:21In 2024, the top 10 highest-grossing films were all franchises.
11:272025 saw even more expansion into pre-existing IP.
11:31If indies are going to make a dent, it's going to be because audiences demand it.
11:36We need to make less Marvel movies.
11:39We need to make more great movies, great stories.
11:42It's going to be smaller.
11:44I think it's going to remain a scrappy industry where people who are really passionate about
11:48it, they're going to continue to create opportunities for themselves.
11:51People are still reading.
11:52People are still optioning.
11:54People are still taking in content.
11:56As long as we keep doing our job and are given the opportunities to create at a high level,
12:01I do think that it will still hold an important place in culture in the long run.
12:18You'll see.
12:19You'll see.
12:20You'll see.
12:21You'll see.
12:21In disorderly, in Might III, it's going to be a part of a current movie-type church.
Comments