Sometimes entire industries realize their audience moved on while they were busy congratulating themselves. That’s where Hollywood sits right now, staring at empty theaters and shrinking payrolls while pretending this is all part of the plan. There was a time when studios wanted to win. Leadership chased audiences. They invested in stories that people actually wanted to see. They took risks in service of entertainment, not ideology. That mindset required discipline, talent, and confidence in the product.
That mindset is gone.
What replaced it is an industry that often does not want to compete. Even if it tried, it lacks the will and, in many cases, the talent. Too many decision makers treat the audience like a problem to be managed instead of customers to be served. They do not believe in the product anymore. They believe in messaging.
I recently read about the ongoing collapse of jobs in Hollywood. It is not a mystery me, nor most of the readers of this website. And now the bill coming due.
Movies used to be an event. You planned your week around them. The problem was choosing what to see first. Today the problem is finding anything worth seeing at all. Streaming did not kill quality. It exposed the lack of it. Studios turned into content mills chasing subscriptions, and the results speak for themselves. A handful of worthwhile titles. A mountain of forgettable filler.
What passes for acceptable now would have been laughed out of a pitch meeting twenty years ago. Standards did not slip. They were abandoned. Network television is worse. It is a factory line of interchangeable shows built for the lowest common denominator. It feels less like entertainment and more like a parody of it. At times it resembles Idiocracy treated as a how-to guide. Sturgeon’s Law may be due an update to a higher quotient.
Hollywood is not confused about its decline. It is in denial about the cause. The industry stopped making entertainment for broad audiences and started producing content for narrow ideological niches. Executives call it art. Audiences call it boring.
The contrast is obvious. After Covid, my wife and I went to see Top Gun: Maverick in a theater, or first cinema visit in well over a year. It delivered what movies used to deliver. Energy, spectacle, and a story that respected the audience. No lectures. No scolding. Just entertainment. People left wanting more. That used to be normal for Hollywood. Think about films like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Rocky, and Back to the Future. People watched them again and again because they enjoyed them. Today most releases feel disposable. You watch once, forget them, and move on.
The reason is not complicated. Modern Hollywood prioritizes agenda over enjoyment. It wants to instruct instead of entertain. It wants to reshape the audience instead of delight it. That is not a winning business model.
Customers notice.
This pattern is not new. America hollowed out parts of its industrial base through decisions that avoided competition. Short term gains replaced long term strength. Leadership chose easier paths. The consequences showed up years later in lost capacity and dependence on others. Entertainment is following the same script. When you stop serving your core audience, you lose them. When you replace quality with messaging, you lose them faster. When you blame them for leaving, you guarantee they do not come back.
Hollywood now behaves like a business that resents its customers. It lectures instead of listens. It signals virtue instead of delivering value. Then it acts surprised when the audience walks away.
The market is not sentimental. It does not reward arrogance. It does not subsidize industries that refuse to compete. If Hollywood continues down this path, the collapse will not be mysterious or sudden. It will be earned, driven by a culture that traded storytelling for sermons and swapped mass appeal for the narrow obsessions of feminization, wokeness, identity politics, DEI, and ESG.
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English (US) · 