WHAT'S WRONG WITH HOLLYWOOD?

This year’s box office is not an abject catastrophe, but it’s a strong indication that people aren’t buying what Hollywood’s selling.

I mean, SEVEN Indiana Jones movies? I stopped going to them after suffering through the second one.

The reason for this state of affairs is that the intergalactic corporate overlords who took over Hollywood in the Nineties never wanted to hear that the Thee Rules of Hollywood are Nobody. Knows. Anything.

What we’re left with from companies run by Reality TV morons like David Zaslav is a Hollywood business model pared down to two things: humongous four-quadrant tentpoles and streaming subscription fees.

When I became the heir of this really nice 50-inch TV after the good friend of a good friend died with nobody to take his stuff, I finally broke down and hooked the thing up to the internet and got my free HBO Plus - which then became Discovery Plus with HBO one “tile” among many.

And they send me emails every Thursday telling me all the Great Stuff they’re going to show that weekend. And I have yet to click on any of them for fear the brain rot might be catching.

But the TV has gotten a workout looking at the HBO stuff from the past 20 years I hadn’t always caught. That and recording stuff from Turner Classic Movies (which Zaslav is in the process of killing since bean brains like him know the price of everything and the value of nothing) or MGM now that Amazon is busy digitizing the library and putting up stuff not seen in a good long while.

And right now, it looks like the geniuses with the $200 million paychecks don’t know how to make a profit in tent poles or streamers. (Have you ever seen a good movie on Netflix? Or Apple? Or any of the others?)

To be clear…

For the Hollywood Geniuses, listening to the Wall Street Geniuses telling them that subscription growth is e verything, and then there’s… Uh, so what's your plan B?

Plan B appears to be a return to the original Plan A: a vibrant movie business based on massive blockbuster hits (with no cable business printing cash this time).

The problem with that plan is that between the full-fledged move into the Streaming Wars and the decade of only making films from Big IP of the Superhero Variety, Hollywood has done so much damage to the theatrical ecosystem and the audience that the blockbuster machinery of yesteryear isn’t there, just sitting on the shelf, waiting to be called back to duty. Plus there’s the problem that the studios’ idea of a blockbuster and the audience’s idea of a blockbuster are two completely different things existing in alternative universes.

I remember when the first Big Movie I worked on, “The Right Stuff” (assistant to the unit publicist, in charge of catering to Chuck Yeager) it cost a whole $24 million smackeroos and everyone marveled at the cost. And when it didn’t work because the director didn’t think the astronauts had The Right Stuff and the audience didn’t show up, that $24 million blooper sank the Ladd Company that made it.

Now they cost $200 million for all the CGI to hide the fact there’s no “there” there, and another $150 million to con you into thinking you want to see the giant turkey, so it has to make at least $500 million so everyone associated with making it happen gets their share. And there haven’t been that many of those lately.

From the beginning of Hollywood to about 20-odd years ago, the studios had a formula that year in and year out worked pretty consistently: a movie studio is a giant distribution network that makes films to feed into that network. The hits pay for the flops and the overhead, and if the hits make slightly more than the flops, they made a profit.

Since Nobody. Knows. Anything. about what will be a hit, a studio needs to have a good number of at-bats to find them. It used to be that if a studio made and released about 20 films a year, there will be 2-3 hits, 2-3 flops and the rest somewhere in between.

And along the way, they kept the theaters full with lots of choices for everyone to stay in the habit of going to the movies regularly, having a robust world of theaters devoted to different types of films for different types of audiences, and they could engage in the experimentation and risk-taking that lets film find its way forward.

That 20 year turning point is crucial. Because 30 years ago, the intergalactic widget-makers got the idea that movies were cool, so they bought the previously-independent studios. And they said Make Hits. When they were told nobody knows whether it’s a hit til the Monday after opening weekend and they count the ticket sales, they got told Make More of What Hit Before.

Then came IP Bob Iger at Disney, buying Pixar! Marvel! Lucasfilm!. The era of Big IP, created labels whose individual products became subservient to the brand, and the sub-brand.

The idea that Hollywood as a whole was going to make fewer bets on fewer but bigger films worked great in the Iger Big IP era. While it worked. Making eight films instead of 22 was a great plan if seven out of eight those could be hits.

But that's a very big “If.” The Big IP strategy kicked in, and for a while, it seemed like the “If” had been taken out of moviemaking.

The dream of making the brand bigger than the individual films didn’t start with Iger. It was the dream of studio owners, who had been flailing around in a world where you have to rebuild your entire business with every single damn film.

Back at the beginning, stars didn't even get their names on films, to keep them from developing a following independent of the studio. Mary Pickford was introduced to the public as “The Biograph Girl.”

Eventually, the stars got their billing, but then studios tried to buy stars en masse. “More stars than there are in heaven” was MGM’s boast. Right down to “Must See TV”, studios tried to make the brand bigger than the film or show or star.

Big IP and the Streaming Vision: Two models that worked incredibly well for their creators, but were devastating for everybody else when they tried to copy them.

By the time Netflix took off, in the 2010s, the box office was a pale shadow of what it had been 10 years earlier (1999 is often considered a contender for the greatest year in film history, in terms of number of films made and the size of the box office): by 2010 it was all big, pompous, overstuffed “tentpoles” and not enough of anything else.

Wall Street took a look at what Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos were doing with Netflix, and said yes, that’s the w ay to do it. The result was the creation of The Firehose - the unceasing flow of “Content,” replacing how shows and films once were born and died in their own lifespans.

Once the artisans ceased being entertainers and became content providers, only a few of them mattered, and hence the creation of working conditions that led to the writers strike.

The result will be bigger, blander, safer, and fewer products from - if things keep drifting this way - a smaller number of studios. The end result of all of this may be to finally prepare the ground for the long-discussed wave of consolidation as events depress the legacy studios even further.

It's not in the least unthinkable that in 18 months to two years, Apple might buy Disney, Comcast could buy Warners, Netflix buy Paramount/Sony Entertainment and/or Lionsgate; leaving three studios - two owned by streamers, plus Amazon.

However, the original sin is the headlong departure from passion for entertainment as the center of Hollywood's business, to believing we were building these content-spewing machines that could defy all that. To the day when everyone started caring about the quarterly earnings call.

When I was a working screenwriter, everything I wrote was something I wanted to see, a project I was willing to go out and bust my balls trying to make it happen. And they all sold to people who read them and said “I want to see this movie!” And every one of the guys who bought my scripts went out and busted their balls to make them happen.

But now, with Content Being King, the pressure is on, and you get a movie like “Greyhound” a couple years back, that Tom Hanks wanted to see so much he went out and option C.S. Forester’s “The Good Shepherd” and made it during COVID for Apple. And the end result of stuffing what could have been a good movie into a Content package. Lots of people I knew wanted to see that movie, and none of us who saw it liked it. All those people did all that work in difficult circumstances, and yes it got a lot of “eyeballs” which is what Apple and t he other streamers use as the measure of success, but all those eyeballs were watching it in disbelief that a premise so good could be done so poorly.

And “Greyhound” isn’t the only one.

This is why the majority of movies that get watched on my great big 50-inch screen were made before around 1995.

Scorsese was right back in 2021 when he said to stop calling them movies and call them by their rightful name: international audio-visual entertainment.

Fortunately the law of averages says that occasionally something good will still slip out no matter how hard the Geniuses try to prevent it.

Me, I’m looking forward to “Killers of the Flower Moon”: Scorses directed; Scorses and Eric Roth wrote it; Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DeCaprio, Kesse Plemons. Yeah, I’m in.

And ditto for Dune - it’s not a sequel, it’s the conclusion of the story.

Two movies I want to see in one year? That’s an embarrassment of riches, these days.

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