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Maybe we are seeing the End of Hollywood as we know it. ALL the Hollywood giants are running out of profit. Even Disney is down. Cinema tickets are declining. Television is dying. Streaming entertainment is declining too. And now Hollywood actors and screenwriters are on strike – demanding more out of a shrinking cake. The New York Times (NYT) reports on this.
But while pointing to these obvious problems, the NYT skips the deeper problems of Hollywood.
Big Hollywood productions are disappointing – not only profit-wise, but also in content. I have felt the irrelevance of Hollywood productions for a long time.
Who cares about another Superhero movie?
Who cares about another Disney movie which is a clone of the previous one?
Even 25 years ago, when I sometimes saw a Disney production, I already lost interest because there was no longer any originality left in Disney productions. The first couple of Terminator movies with Schwarzenegger were creative. But when I saw the last Terminator movie, it was clearly expensive to make, but endlessly boring. I really enjoyed all the Star Wars movies, all 6 of them. That is because George Lucas had an idea with Star Wars. It was fun, but George Lucas also had a story to tell – a story about persons, a story about empire, evil, deception, the magic of the world, fall, and redemption. But then note again, that George Lucas back then was able to make the first Star Wars movie even though it went against the prevailing stream in Hollywood at the time. That is probably no longer possible. No, I don’t want to see plastic movies on the Star Wars theme made by Disney. Just don’t care.
When did we last see something epic from Hollywood like Godfather or Apocalypse now?
Or the brutal humor of Pulp Fiction?
Movies which were daring, visually fascinating (beautiful or horrific), erotically intriguing, or emotional in their theme. Nobody knows anymore. But I am not typical. I have no television, and no streaming entertainment service. But just looking at the boring repetitiveness of the movie titles for more than a decade, it is clear that the quality and relevance of Hollywood has melted.
The profound loss of quality, originality, courage, and edge in Hollywood has developed simultaneously with Hollywood’s woke-ism. Hollywood and Disney both stood for woke-ism. Woke-ism is so much about “correctness” that nobody can do anything personal, something with an edge, or the slightest risk of irritation or provocation. No longer can Hollywood have a macho-male hero with a big gun who says “Make my day!”. But woke-ism outside of Hollywood is going down now, not only in the USA, but also among the majority or the World population living in the non-West. What about the billions of audience in China and India? Hollywood can forget about them too. Good. Other countries may start caring more about their own cultural productions.
And with actors and screenwriters fighting against AI, they will even block the creativity and cost-cutting opportunities which AI could infuse into Hollywood.
Will Apple and Amazon buy the Hollywood companies when they are sufficiently cheap, as NYT suggests? Perhaps. But that won’t save the Hollywood productions if they are irrelevant. Or even worse: If Hollywood itself has become irrelevant. Maybe other suppliers of cultural content (like for instance Apple and Amazon) will simply skip Hollywood and find other sources of cultural production where more interesting content is produced. Creating cheaper but more diversified content and distributing it (with AI!) to a much more diverse public, where each individual can get something much more appealing to personal preferences.
Interestingly, the US crisis in culture production is not only afflicting Hollywood. Other once-upon-a-time “eternal” icons of US culture are in deep trouble too.
Burger King rebranded their logo in efforts to stop the decline in their sales.
And McDonald’s is in trouble too. The US lost cultural attractiveness with the second Gulf War. Based on lies and ending with a humiliating retreat. No longer could Hollywood believably present a cosmetic image of the US as “purely a force for Good”.
And where the US defeat in Vietnam created an American cultural revival due to culture-producers in Hollywood who back then had courage and ability to reflect also morally critically on the role of the US in the World, this is not the state of the US or Hollywood today. Afghanistan was another blow for US cultural attractivity. China, India, Russia, Türkiye, the Middle East (incl. Saudi Arabian finance) are striving to build their own cultural productions featuring their own culture at center-point. Latin America has its own cultural productions too. US consumer brands are also falling out of favor in China. US hegemony is coming to an end – also culturally. Instead, we may see the multi-cultural World thrive.
And we haven’t yet even seen the fallout of Ukraine’s defeat on the attractivity of US culture. The US has promised to “stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”. Well, it will only take a few more months, before we start seeing the end of Ukraine as it was created when the Soviet Union dissolved. The US’ failing ability to “stand with Ukraine” will certainly be a big crash for the believability of US culture and soft power too.
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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
