TLDR: Hollywood has been disrupted
by Vanity Fair (these highlights provided for you by Annotote)
“ the vision of Hollywood’s economic future came into terrifyingly full and rare clarity [because of] how inefficient the film-and-TV business appeared to have become … such a scene might give a Silicon Valley venture capitalist a stroke on account of the apparent unused labor and excessive cost involved in staging such a production
“ Hollywood, these days, seems remarkably poised for a similar disruption. Its audiences increasingly prefer on-demand content, its labor is costly, and margins are shrinking. Yet when I ask people in Hollywood if they fear such a fate, their response is generally one of defiance. Film executives are smart and nimble, but many also assert that what they do is so specialized that it can’t be compared to the sea changes in other disrupted media. “We’re different,” one producer recently told me. “No one can do what we do.”
“ These days, however, all the major tech companies are competing viciously for the same thing: your attention.
“ all those TV workers feel as if they are in safe harbor, given that the production side of a project is protected by the unions … These unions, however, are actually unlikely to pose a significant, or lasting, protection. Newspaper guilds [for example] prevented people from losing jobs immediately, but in the end they have been complicit in big buyouts that have shrunk the newspaper industry’s workforce by 56% since 2000. Moreover, start-ups see entrenched government regulation, and inert unions, not so much as impediments but as one more thing to disrupt.
“ If the industry continues the process of “windowing” (in which studios wait weeks, or sometimes months, to release a film that has already been in the theaters onto other platforms), people will continue to steal a movie they want to see, or they’ll simply stop watching them altogether.
“ Like everything else involving money and creativity, there will indeed be a top category — those who have great, new, innovative ideas, and who stand above everyone else — that is truly irreplaceable. (Indeed, this has proved to be the case in music, journalism, and publishing.) There will be great screenwriters and even great actors. The real winners, however, are the consumers. We won’t have to pay $50 to go to the movies on a date night, and we’ll be able to watch what we want to watch, when we want, and, most important, where we want.
