The Screen Actors Guild is on the verge of agreeing terms, ending Hollywood’s six-month mothballing. Studio chiefs facing 8 November full-year earnings calls, and a Wall Street unimpressed with the millions in losses predicted, seem finally to have broken the deadlock.
Post-strike, normal is still a long way off. There’s a vast production backlog, nothing on the shelves, sweeping cuts in prospect, UK companies teetering on the brink of insolvency and bad blood between the creatives and the money.
There are no December blockbusters, Disney has taken Star Wars, Avengers and Avatar movies from its 2024 slate, Mission: Impossible 8 and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights have moved to 2025, while streamers are cutting programming by 30 per cent and upping subscriptions to £10 per month. The question is, will normal ever return?
The Oscars are in peril, big deals with talent have been axed and adults have abandoned cinemas – the video game movie Five Nights at Freddy’s took $209 million in its opening week, despite awful reviews, while Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon looks unlikely to take more than $150 million worldwide.
With Wall Street no longer valuing streaming companies as tech giants – and interest rates remaining high – this autumn Netflix and Disney will start charging over £10 for a top-tier sub, while the monthly cost of Apple+ hits £9.
Those studios that stepped outside the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, most notably A24 and Lionsgate, have been making movies with union agreement, but not many. And both have locked into what seems to be Hollywood’s future – internationalisation.
That means more films and shows made abroad and more films and shows designed for a global audience. Recent writers’ notes included the advice “don’t use a lot of big words”.
Some things have become clear, among them: streaming services aren’t actually a great business. Tens of billions of dollars have flowed into streaming content, away from movies and linear TV, losing legacy studios $10 billion in 2022 with only Netflix showing a profit. It’s a dire situation.
Big names need to keep proving themselves. The Game of Thrones duo David Benioff and DB Weiss haven’t had a follow-up hit. If their new show, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, flops, they won’t get the slack they used to.
Cinemas are in trouble. In 2019, worldwide movie ticket sales hit an all-time high of $42.3 billion. They’ll be lucky to hit $10 billion in 2023 – the best-performing year since.
The younger audience is on YouTube and TikTok. Netflix has roughly 250 million paying households and is set to generate over $6 billion this year. YouTube has 2.7 billion active users, 80 million paying users and will generate $30.4 billion, while TikTok has 1.7 billion active users and is set to take $13.2 billion in 2023.
“There’s still every reason to believe that entertainment will persist, and that Hollywood will have some role to play,” says Richard Rushfield, editorial director of the Hollywood tip sheet The Ankler. “But it will be an industry of a very different shape and size. We’re the Mayflower halfway across the Atlantic right now. We know what the world we’ve left behind looked like, but we have no idea what the new world will look like. We’re heading there all the same.”