So what's the future looking like for Film & TV?
Well, my crystal ball's not getting any better reception than anyone else's, but what the hey?
Load up your snacks.
Here's what I think's happening in broad strokes.
One: Smaller, fewer, cheaper, less.
I've been saying this a while and we're already seeing it.
Smaller budgets, smaller core casts, fewer guest stars and day players, not as many releases.
And yes, runaway productions.
Cast a dozen Americans, ship them off to somewhere in Europe, hire locals for everything below the line.
More or less what's been happening in Vancouver, Atlanta, and Albuquerque. Just taking it a step farther.
From Ant-Man to Endgame, Marvel itself filmed half of it's work in Atlanta.
Everything for Phase Six either is or will be filming in London.
But even runaway production doesn't change the fact that there's less all around the world.
Box office and ad dollars ain't what they used to be.
Food, fuel, insurance, and man-hours have all gotten more expensive.
And filmmaking uses more of all four than you'd think.
Two: broadcast fades away while AVOD takes a front row seat.
Americans want to watch what they want, when they want to, how they want to.
Being tied to a schedule ain't cool with us.
Which means broadcast is going to keep moving away from scripted narrative shows and move more towards stuff that requires a schedule, like sports, news, and reality-competition.
They're most of the way there already. I looked up how many narrative shows were actually being broadcast in prime time this week, as opposed to animation, game shows, or reality.
13 on CBS, 9 on NBC, 3 on the CW, 2 on Fox and one on ABC.
This includes legacy shows, like the various Chicago (insert public service here) shows, NCIS, and Law & Order.
No way to blame them.
Eyeballs are going elsewhere, as are advertisers.
Might as well concentrate on one-and-done shows you're not having to pay residuals for.
Cable and premium channels are in similar boats, and most of them are already tied in to one streamer or another already.
Streaming threw the old production year out the lineup in favor of releasing new shows as they please. Sometimes it's the old fashioned fall and spring, sometimes it's released in waves, like Andor was and how Stranger Things will. And maybe it will just dump entire seasons in one go, ready to binge.
While this is happening, SVOD (Streaming Video On Demand) and AVOD (Ad-supported Streaming Video On Demand) are merging as SVOD platforms add ad-supported tiers. We're still going to see a lot of the same names, but a lot of the bigger ones are going to be streamers that dabble in broadcasting instead of vice versa.
Three: AI's gonna cost people their jobs, but eventually will be just another tool.
I remember something before I enlisted. Some kid had made an internet video with more VFX shots than Attack of the Clones.
Two, maybe three years after ILM's top of the line work, and some kid on a desktop had more VFX shots.
It's 20 years later, and the number of people on the set hasn't changed all that much.
Hasn't changed all that much in the last century.
Because no matter how close it comes, AI is a good enough broad strokes tool.
And neither good enough or broad strokes will cut it.
Not in making movies.
And if you're working on movies good enough to watch more than once, whether you're a performer, a department head, or a specialist, you are skilled precision labor.
Skilled precision labor in pursuit of telling a human story is what we do as filmmakers.
We've all seen CGI that fell flat. And most of the time it didn't fall flat because of renderings or frame rates.
It fell flat because the lack of care showed through.
That breathtaking view was just pixels.
Those huge robots fighting each other were pixels on pixels.
And we didn't have reason to give a shit.
Eventually, prompters will become puppeteers.
But that won't be for a while yet.
Four: reels are going to keep being a mess.
Social medias are going to keep making their money on paid ads, which means they're going to keep throttling content that doesn't pay them.
Which means creators are going to keep dancing to Al Gore's rhythm section.
Got some feelings there.
Everything from "can we just give growing performers room to screw up?" to "some gates need keeping."
But for now, the mess will continue.
Five: the international box office, especially China, is no longer a guaranteed moneymaker.
Covid squashed it and current politics put a stake in the heart.
In most of the 2010's, you could reliably spend $100M on a Scifi or superhero movie, make your production and publicity budget back in China alone, and the billion you made domestically was pure profit. And half the time, even if you bombed in the US, you made your money back in China.
All for the low price of playing to the CCP's censors.
Not anymore.
Aquaman made $300M in China. Aquaman 2 made $50M.
Ant-man 2? $120M. Ant-man 3? $39M
Captain Marvel? $154M. The Marvels? $15M
The numbers just aren't there anymore.
Six: because of one and five, we'll be seeing more children's and horror in theaters, less scifi and superheroes.
I've already explained this in that horror allows for creative expression that top actors and directors crave, without the inherently large budgets of scifi, fantasy, and superhero stories. Horror also has a strong fanbase that's passionate and willing to give chances.
Children's and family films, on the other hand, are bringing in the crowds because taking the kids to the movies is the new taking the kids to Disneyland: only affordable once or twice a year, but you can do it.
The reactions to Minecraft and Lilo & Stitch are adding to my evidence pile there.
Five: Hollywood's stepping back from the culture wars because they're proving to be more trouble than they're worth.
This is normally when I tell the usual gang of boomer assholes lowing "go woke, get broke" to sit down, shut up, and take their meds.
Thing is, they're not entirely wrong.
While the faces of Hollywood have always been left-leaning if not completely ctrl-left, the suits, especially the mysterious People Who Can Say Yes, are diehard capitalists more than anything else.
O mighty dollar.
And the ctrl-left's constant update downloads of the latest virtue signals and shibboleths has gotten into Hollywood's OODA loop (look it up).
It takes six months or more to get an episode of TV from page to screen (with exceptions like SNL and South Park).
Two years minimum for a feature film.
Five years for an animated film.
And the ctrl-left's crusade du jur can kick in in a matter of weeks.
So what was perfectly cool the month before it was written was toxic waste by the time it hits the screen.
The ctrl-left mob
- never takes a win
- never appreciates effort, and
- is never, ever satisfied.
Then recently, a lot of the country said "this is bullshit, and we're not putting up with it anymore."
And they voted with their dollars.
Indiana Jones? Where we spent the movie telling the crusty old Caucasian dude how wrong he was?
$383M worldwide. $3M from China.
Top Gun: Maverick? Where Maverick definitely has things to contribute even as he's passing the torch?
$1.5B worldwide. Didn't fucking bother screening in China.
That's on top of Taylor Sheridan single-handedly keeping cable's lights on by making shows that flyover country eats up with a spoon.
I don't think Sheridan's RW at all (he does not let the yellowstone-verse forget what a shit deal native americans have gotten throughout history). But he found work that treats flyover country people like people, and that shit's been scarce lately.
Yellowstone at first glance is a twist on Sons of Anarchy (where Sheridan was fired from, I might add).
Where Sons of Anarchy is Hamlet with Bikers, Yellowstone is King Lear with Cowboys.
And it, and it's successors and imitators, works.
Take a name silver fox actor known for playing badasses in the 80's and 90's, give him an assortment of quirky, blue-collar, flyover country side characters, and let them be badasses.
Yeah, the Duttons are ruthless. But they care about their families, their freedoms, and their property, and they aren't afraid for fight for all of the above. That resonates with people the ctrl-left despise, and who Hollywood ignored. But now that Sheridan's found that audience, the People Who Can Say Yes are following the leader, as they do with successful formulas.
I've already written about how Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton is a monsterfucker romance for middle-aged flyover country women.
1883, 1923, Tulsa King, and Landman all follow this, and are all proving immensely popular.
Yellowstone and Landman even have the same guest arc where a straw liberal hot chick shows up from the left coast, throws her nonexistent weight around, gets thoroughly schooled, and just as they're adjusting to the new worldview, they get a non-zero chance to fuck the silver fox.
Do I think this means stepping backwards as far as representation goes?
Absolutely not.
In fact, our lessened reliance on the Chinese market means more representation as we don't have to pander to their censorship.
But neither will check in the box representation be used to excuse poor writing or worse execution.
More Agatha All Alongs and less Acolytes is what I'm going at it.
None of this making a coven of BIPOC lesbian witches only to make them boring, make their only superpower be mind violation, have one of their victims beg their forgiveness before punching his own ticket, all die of aneurysms when denied the ability to violate minds, and costing $230M when all is said and done.
More like a show that's tightly written with a small cast that costs under $100M.
It was full of diverse women over 40 and was hella gay and nobody gave a shit because it was incredibly well written, the song was catchy as fuck, and the performances were amazing.
So that's it.
Smaller, fewer, cheaper, less.
Broadcast is fading while AVOD is stepping up.
China ain't dictating terms no more.
Reels are gonna be a mess.
The culture wars ain't worth the effort.
If you're in the industry and struggling, I wish I had more hopeful news to say.
I delayed doing this by a few days because I just had my first audition since January.
I'm moving on with my own projects, keeping my passport up to date, and expanding my skill sets whenever possible. And that's the best I can advise you as well.
Take care of yourselves out there.
Well, my crystal ball's not getting any better reception than anyone else's, but what the hey?
Load up your snacks.
Here's what I think's happening in broad strokes.
One: Smaller, fewer, cheaper, less.
I've been saying this a while and we're already seeing it.
Smaller budgets, smaller core casts, fewer guest stars and day players, not as many releases.
And yes, runaway productions.
Cast a dozen Americans, ship them off to somewhere in Europe, hire locals for everything below the line.
More or less what's been happening in Vancouver, Atlanta, and Albuquerque. Just taking it a step farther.
From Ant-Man to Endgame, Marvel itself filmed half of it's work in Atlanta.
Everything for Phase Six either is or will be filming in London.
But even runaway production doesn't change the fact that there's less all around the world.
Box office and ad dollars ain't what they used to be.
Food, fuel, insurance, and man-hours have all gotten more expensive.
And filmmaking uses more of all four than you'd think.
Two: broadcast fades away while AVOD takes a front row seat.
Americans want to watch what they want, when they want to, how they want to.
Being tied to a schedule ain't cool with us.
Which means broadcast is going to keep moving away from scripted narrative shows and move more towards stuff that requires a schedule, like sports, news, and reality-competition.
They're most of the way there already. I looked up how many narrative shows were actually being broadcast in prime time this week, as opposed to animation, game shows, or reality.
13 on CBS, 9 on NBC, 3 on the CW, 2 on Fox and one on ABC.
This includes legacy shows, like the various Chicago (insert public service here) shows, NCIS, and Law & Order.
No way to blame them.
Eyeballs are going elsewhere, as are advertisers.
Might as well concentrate on one-and-done shows you're not having to pay residuals for.
Cable and premium channels are in similar boats, and most of them are already tied in to one streamer or another already.
Streaming threw the old production year out the lineup in favor of releasing new shows as they please. Sometimes it's the old fashioned fall and spring, sometimes it's released in waves, like Andor was and how Stranger Things will. And maybe it will just dump entire seasons in one go, ready to binge.
While this is happening, SVOD (Streaming Video On Demand) and AVOD (Ad-supported Streaming Video On Demand) are merging as SVOD platforms add ad-supported tiers. We're still going to see a lot of the same names, but a lot of the bigger ones are going to be streamers that dabble in broadcasting instead of vice versa.
Three: AI's gonna cost people their jobs, but eventually will be just another tool.
I remember something before I enlisted. Some kid had made an internet video with more VFX shots than Attack of the Clones.
Two, maybe three years after ILM's top of the line work, and some kid on a desktop had more VFX shots.
It's 20 years later, and the number of people on the set hasn't changed all that much.
Hasn't changed all that much in the last century.
Because no matter how close it comes, AI is a good enough broad strokes tool.
And neither good enough or broad strokes will cut it.
Not in making movies.
And if you're working on movies good enough to watch more than once, whether you're a performer, a department head, or a specialist, you are skilled precision labor.
Skilled precision labor in pursuit of telling a human story is what we do as filmmakers.
We've all seen CGI that fell flat. And most of the time it didn't fall flat because of renderings or frame rates.
It fell flat because the lack of care showed through.
That breathtaking view was just pixels.
Those huge robots fighting each other were pixels on pixels.
And we didn't have reason to give a shit.
Eventually, prompters will become puppeteers.
But that won't be for a while yet.
Four: reels are going to keep being a mess.
Social medias are going to keep making their money on paid ads, which means they're going to keep throttling content that doesn't pay them.
Which means creators are going to keep dancing to Al Gore's rhythm section.
Got some feelings there.
Everything from "can we just give growing performers room to screw up?" to "some gates need keeping."
But for now, the mess will continue.
Five: the international box office, especially China, is no longer a guaranteed moneymaker.
Covid squashed it and current politics put a stake in the heart.
In most of the 2010's, you could reliably spend $100M on a Scifi or superhero movie, make your production and publicity budget back in China alone, and the billion you made domestically was pure profit. And half the time, even if you bombed in the US, you made your money back in China.
All for the low price of playing to the CCP's censors.
Not anymore.
Aquaman made $300M in China. Aquaman 2 made $50M.
Ant-man 2? $120M. Ant-man 3? $39M
Captain Marvel? $154M. The Marvels? $15M
The numbers just aren't there anymore.
Six: because of one and five, we'll be seeing more children's and horror in theaters, less scifi and superheroes.
I've already explained this in that horror allows for creative expression that top actors and directors crave, without the inherently large budgets of scifi, fantasy, and superhero stories. Horror also has a strong fanbase that's passionate and willing to give chances.
Children's and family films, on the other hand, are bringing in the crowds because taking the kids to the movies is the new taking the kids to Disneyland: only affordable once or twice a year, but you can do it.
The reactions to Minecraft and Lilo & Stitch are adding to my evidence pile there.
Five: Hollywood's stepping back from the culture wars because they're proving to be more trouble than they're worth.
This is normally when I tell the usual gang of boomer assholes lowing "go woke, get broke" to sit down, shut up, and take their meds.
Thing is, they're not entirely wrong.
While the faces of Hollywood have always been left-leaning if not completely ctrl-left, the suits, especially the mysterious People Who Can Say Yes, are diehard capitalists more than anything else.
O mighty dollar.
And the ctrl-left's constant update downloads of the latest virtue signals and shibboleths has gotten into Hollywood's OODA loop (look it up).
It takes six months or more to get an episode of TV from page to screen (with exceptions like SNL and South Park).
Two years minimum for a feature film.
Five years for an animated film.
And the ctrl-left's crusade du jur can kick in in a matter of weeks.
So what was perfectly cool the month before it was written was toxic waste by the time it hits the screen.
The ctrl-left mob
- never takes a win
- never appreciates effort, and
- is never, ever satisfied.
Then recently, a lot of the country said "this is bullshit, and we're not putting up with it anymore."
And they voted with their dollars.
Indiana Jones? Where we spent the movie telling the crusty old Caucasian dude how wrong he was?
$383M worldwide. $3M from China.
Top Gun: Maverick? Where Maverick definitely has things to contribute even as he's passing the torch?
$1.5B worldwide. Didn't fucking bother screening in China.
That's on top of Taylor Sheridan single-handedly keeping cable's lights on by making shows that flyover country eats up with a spoon.
I don't think Sheridan's RW at all (he does not let the yellowstone-verse forget what a shit deal native americans have gotten throughout history). But he found work that treats flyover country people like people, and that shit's been scarce lately.
Yellowstone at first glance is a twist on Sons of Anarchy (where Sheridan was fired from, I might add).
Where Sons of Anarchy is Hamlet with Bikers, Yellowstone is King Lear with Cowboys.
And it, and it's successors and imitators, works.
Take a name silver fox actor known for playing badasses in the 80's and 90's, give him an assortment of quirky, blue-collar, flyover country side characters, and let them be badasses.
Yeah, the Duttons are ruthless. But they care about their families, their freedoms, and their property, and they aren't afraid for fight for all of the above. That resonates with people the ctrl-left despise, and who Hollywood ignored. But now that Sheridan's found that audience, the People Who Can Say Yes are following the leader, as they do with successful formulas.
I've already written about how Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton is a monsterfucker romance for middle-aged flyover country women.
1883, 1923, Tulsa King, and Landman all follow this, and are all proving immensely popular.
Yellowstone and Landman even have the same guest arc where a straw liberal hot chick shows up from the left coast, throws her nonexistent weight around, gets thoroughly schooled, and just as they're adjusting to the new worldview, they get a non-zero chance to fuck the silver fox.
Do I think this means stepping backwards as far as representation goes?
Absolutely not.
In fact, our lessened reliance on the Chinese market means more representation as we don't have to pander to their censorship.
But neither will check in the box representation be used to excuse poor writing or worse execution.
More Agatha All Alongs and less Acolytes is what I'm going at it.
None of this making a coven of BIPOC lesbian witches only to make them boring, make their only superpower be mind violation, have one of their victims beg their forgiveness before punching his own ticket, all die of aneurysms when denied the ability to violate minds, and costing $230M when all is said and done.
More like a show that's tightly written with a small cast that costs under $100M.
It was full of diverse women over 40 and was hella gay and nobody gave a shit because it was incredibly well written, the song was catchy as fuck, and the performances were amazing.
So that's it.
Smaller, fewer, cheaper, less.
Broadcast is fading while AVOD is stepping up.
China ain't dictating terms no more.
Reels are gonna be a mess.
The culture wars ain't worth the effort.
If you're in the industry and struggling, I wish I had more hopeful news to say.
I delayed doing this by a few days because I just had my first audition since January.
I'm moving on with my own projects, keeping my passport up to date, and expanding my skill sets whenever possible. And that's the best I can advise you as well.
Take care of yourselves out there.
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