Hollywood on Strike...RIP

[Gordon3]

Originally Posted by DTravel

Expect a long strike. Other reports I've read indicate the studios are out to break the unions this time. It has already come out that they don't intend to even start talks with the Writers until October or so, when "they have lost their homes and apartments" for lack of money.

The quality of what's out there has never been worse. From "prestige dramas" (read: snuff films) and fkg superhero movies, no wonder people can't get rid of their subscriptions fast enough and churn to something, anything else. The incumbent entertainment industry, plus tech companies trying to lock people into their stuff, was sure to create far too many streaming services, in an effort to bring back the cable bundle. But, people got tired of the saturation of cable television, and they're not going for the shiny new oversaturated thing. Plus, the industry is making shows that only seem to entertain the 1% (the fault of both sides), while wanting the 99% to pay for it, just like cable. Throw in the tokenism, I mean, inclusion stuffed into older franchises and the lack of original stories, and the industry is largely sustaining massive losses, two full years after the pandemic.

If the AMPTP thinks they can starve out the strikers, let's break down some of their vulnerabilities:

1. Disney's movie businesses: now straight up losing hundreds of millions per movie, like the last Indiana Jones film. Nothing good looks to be in the pipeline, thanks to the 3-4 year timeline required to develop a movie.
2. The rest of the theatrical movie business: outside of "retro" movies like Mission: Impossible and an occasional independent production, nobody cares. Superhero fatigue is in full swing.
3. Warner Bros./Discovery: another cable-heavy loser of billions. Has made up for it by mostly getting out of the movie business, as DC films weren't faring any better, as well as DOA network, the CW. [HBO] Max has been pulling content off of their service, and has experienced a lot of ups and downs in their original programming.
4. Disney+: some analysts think it will be gone within a year. They just don't produce anything people want to watch.
5. ESPN: loses billions, yet has billions more in outstanding contracts. They literally can't fire employees fast enough. People have quit sports, and the ratings show it. Disney is looking to sell this hot potato.
6. ABC: Disney is looking to sell this too. But to whom? Speaking of dead broadcast networks, Fox is in Disney's portfolio too. The mouse is stuck with a bunch of dead assets. In summary, Iger & the rest of Disney management has got to be in full panic mode right now.

7. Peacock & Paramount+: already lose billions a year, and as they run out their backlog of new shows, their few subscribers wil bolt. Again, if the strikes go on for a year, which I think is likely, they'll be gone too. After the 'Cock, Comcast will be stuck with low-profit entities, NBC/Universal & an ISP business, and losing entities, a portfolio of cable channels. Paramount will be CBS.
8. AppleTV+: the bad public relations created by this soon-to-be extended strike will stain them too, and I think, will cause Apple to drop their hobby of trying to make TV shows.
9. Amazon Prime: they've already cut back on original productions, even though a sequel to their disasterous Lord of the Rings show is supposedly still in the works. Their NFL contract hasn't moved the needle. I've noticed, and others have reported, that a lot of older shows have slowly disappeared from Prime, and moved over to the "FAST" services (ad-supported multiple live channel streaming). For books & audiobooks, Amazon already has pay-per-book services. Some analysts think that Prime video will move entirely to this model, with Prime subscribers getting a discount on "pay-per-shows".
10. Hulu: a good idea, especially if they could ever find a way to offer a-la-carte cable channels. But, being split between Disney & Comcast and their recent loss of subscribers don't bode well for this weirdly-named app.
11. YouTube & other free, ad-supported vertical video sites: ad rates are down 75%, reportedly, and a lot of those "content creators", and that deunionized economy, are slowly dying. I guess "targeted advertising" isn't what it's cracked up to be.

To summarize, the streaming "revolution" that started these strikes will experience quite the culling, as the walkouts continue. What survives in anything resembling its current form (as in, not having to sell or shutdown significant assets)?

1. Netflix: they're the ones who started the realization that customers are churning these services like crazy. They're also the ones most villified by the strikers. But, they're number one. On the other hand, they're also making stuff no one watches, so what's their future? Maybe pay-per-shows too?
2. FAST Services: this is the future of streaming, as well as cable-style channels, I think. Even a few YouTube operations have started showing up on apps like PlutoTV, to provide a backup in case YouTube cuts off ad sharing. As prestige TV becomes too expensive, and other things, like cable channels, die off, people will discover the nearly infinite inventory of old shows on these services. And, you can't beat the price of $0.
3. Broadcast Networks: since streaming won't save them, and cable is already on life support (see the bankruptcy of Sinclair/Diamond Sports and their portfolio of Regional Sports Networks), sports will have to settle for the money they can get here. A symbiotic relationship may serve both well. As genres like reality shows die, the networks will also have to focus on making shows people want to watch. Since their costs are lower, they may be the best positioned to return as the primary provider of new, original television.
4. Sony & some other smaller movie studios might be OK just to sit tight for a while.
5. Max may be one of the few major streaming services to survive, but only if they don't make anymore Velma.

On the other side of this conflict, the problem for most of the strikers, and ironically for the industry, is that their careers are really already over. There will be fewer productions, with fewer streaming services and cable channels. Most never made much to begin with and certainly not enough to continue to be able to afford to live in Los Angeles. Many of these people, both writers and actors, already have to be planning moves and new careers (preferably in a less saturated industry). So, the strikers literally have nothing to lose, but revenge on the corporations. The overconsolidation of media in the US is finally coming home to roost. Get me some popcorn.

[Gordon3]

Disney CEO Bob Iger blurted out on TV that Disney didn't need traditional TV anymore, despite the fact that Disney+ is largely responsible for their running $1 billion losses per quarter. General reaction across Disney? Getting their resumes up-to-date. (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...124034450.html)

People's habits change quickly, and streaming appears to be in more trouble than cable. Iger, and the rest of his ilk, are very slow to recognize their tenuous position:

1. Surveys from the last several months indicate that viewers are dissatisfied with what's on streaming (https://www.pcmag.com/news/welcome-b...aming-services , https://www.tomsguide.com/news/cutti...bout-streaming). Some quotes:

This all may be just about tolerable if the vast majority of this programming was good, but much of it isn’t...And, of course, when consumers get mad, they are likely to switch off – especially when they are already feeling a sense of breaking point with the number of platforms they’re being asked to sign up to. (from https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...reaming-broken)

“Where’s my Alias? Where’s my West Wing? Where’s my 24? Where’s my Ally McBeal, Once and Again, and Brothers & Sisters? I have a friend who works at Netflix, and for years I’ve been asking, ‘When are all of you streamers going to get your prestige heads out of your asses?’”

“I think we may be in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.”

"Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway."

“The solutions weirdly all revert back to what used to be on some level.” (from https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/stre...paramount.html)

It's fun to watch brains explode with the obvious.

2. People habitually watch one show & then immediately cancel (https://www.forbes.com/home-improvem...eaming-survey/).

3. The economics just don't make sense. This article is technical and a bit dated, so it doesn't address the economics of niche content (i.e., everything on the Internet), but there are some interesting take-aways from https://dougshapiro.medium.com/one-c...-683304b3055d:

"streaming generates only 1/6 as much revenue per streaming home as pay TV"..."streaming monetizes at a lower rate per hour of consumption, also implying a perpetual drag as usage continues to shift"..."Going direct-to-consumer also adds significant operating costs for traditional networks."..."another source of profit pressure will be much higher churn, due to much lower consumer switching costs."

[Gordon3]

There's an interesting side angle brewing in Hollywood (and there's no college sports thread here). The ballooning costs of movies & TV shows have been well-documented. So, have the losses of the failed streaming service experiment and of the failed superhero movie experiment and of the 500-channel cable TV experiment. Less well-documented are the ballooning costs of broadcasting sporting events.

The Pac-12 Conference, which includes schools like Stanford & Cal Berkeley, have had 3 members leave (UCLA, USC, & Colorado). The conference has been feverishly looking for another big rights deal for their games, with virtually no takers. Disney, Comcast, etc. ghosted them, as their ratings are historically notoriously low. Now 4 other schools, including the aforementioned Bay Area schools, plus Washington & Oregon, are joining the LA schools in the Big 10, a historically Midwestern-based conference that has a shiny, new, primarily broadcast-based TV deal. Other large institutions like Florida State are putting out their "Open for Business" sign. A super conference is coming. This leaves the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 out in the cold for any big future TV rights deals.

I mention this because this is clear evidence that the money tap in Hollywood is running dry. It's not because there's no money in the bank, it's because it's now more expensive to operate than it is to sit on the interest.

[Devius]

Thank you for an incisive and intelligent thread, and refreshingly free of "left v right political dogma"...

One small point: IMO, the success of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 shows there is still an appetite for the superhero genre - IF DONE RIGHT. Sadly though, this film and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (so far) appears to be exceptions to the recent offerings, which range from middling to "Meh" to outright dross (take a bow, Thor: Love and Thunder).

Anyway, according to a recent "Vanity Fair" article, the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood’s biggest studios have agreed to meet for the first time in three months...

It took 92 days, but the stalemate between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood’s biggest studios and streamers has come to an end. On Tuesday, Carol Lombardini, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), reached out to WGA leadership to request a meeting to discuss restarting contract negotiations, which have been on pause since writers decided to strike on May 1. They are scheduled to sit down on Friday, the WGA shared with its 11,500 members in an email sent Tuesday night.

A meeting between the two at-odds groups doesn’t mean that talks will immediately resume, but it is a clear sign that the ice has thawed after a three-month work stoppage. The WGA said it would share updates with its members after the meeting, cautioning them to be wary of rumors: “Whenever there is important news to share, you will hear it directly from us.”

This was going to happen eventually. “They will come back to us,” WGA negotiating committee cochair Chris Keyser said in a July 26 video updating members on the strike. But when, exactly, was up for debate. Predicting when the strike will end has become Hollywood’s favorite parlor game, with guesses ranging from fall to, at their most extreme, early next year.

For several weeks, the writers seemed like they would be in this fight alone. In early June, the Directors Guild of America reached a deal that included an increase in foreign residuals and confirmation that AI could not replace work performed by members. But the July 13 decision by SAG-AFTRA to send its 160,000 actor and performer members out on strike, shutting down nearly all scripted television and film productions, has ratcheted up the pressure on the studios to resume negotiations. Though the studios were prepared to weather some production delays, a complete work stoppage that lasts through Labor Day could be catastrophic, threatening the fall TV season, pushing back big-budget movie premieres, and throwing awards season into disarray. (The Emmys, which were scheduled to air September 18, have already been postponed, and fall is when Oscar campaigning kicks into high gear.)

Both strikes will need to be resolved in order for Hollywood to get fully back to work, but it might be easier for the AMPTP to reach an agreement with the WGA at this time. While the actors’ fight is still fresh—SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said during a Tuesday morning interview on the Today show that the guild has “financially prepared ourselves for the next six months”—the battle with the writers is creeping closer to the 100-day mark, the point at which the 2007 strike was coming to an end.

“We remain committed to finding a path to mutually beneficial deals with both unions,” a spokesperson for the AMPTP said in a statement.

Representatives from the studios met last Friday to discuss finding a path to the resumption of negotiations. But as recently as Tuesday morning, the other WGA negotiating committee cochair, David Goodman, told Vanity Fair that the guild had not yet received a call from the AMPTP. “We’re ready to go back to the table, we’re ready to end this, but we’ll fight for as long as we have to,” he said. “We’ve got no official outreach yet, but we’re ready whenever they want.”

Even if talks do resume soon, they won’t necessarily lead to a quick resolution. The two sides ended talks far apart on several key issues, including how to regulate the use of AI. The writers are also asking for raises and increases in streaming residuals. As Keyser noted recently, “Saying no to labor in unison is a lot easier than saying yes.”

Extracted from:
Is This the Beginning of the End of the Writers Strike? (Vanity Fair August 2, 2023)

[healthy_tatsu1]

I don't subscribe to any of the streaming services, but I have seen the odd bits of material they produce, for me the overall impression is mainly one of over-saturation and too many productions that seem to be trying to please everyone (I did enjoy Andor though).



I agree the Superhero stuff since Avengers Endgame has been mostly poor, Disney etc have taken viewer loyalty for granted and tried to milk their lesser material with creative talent spread too thin, Spiderverse and The Boys have been notable exceptions.



However on both points I think a period of consolodation will be followed by stronger material again. It has been striking how the MCU movies have mirrored the patterns of Marvel Comics Publishing, they follow periods of success with less creative risk-taking leading to falling sales, and when things get bad enough they have nothing to lose by taking off the straitjacket again - cue a return to success.


I hope the actors and writers get a better deal, both for their welfare and future quality of output - if these studios have free rein to crank out AI generated stuff they could REALLY crank out the average nonsense even moreso.

[Gordon3]

Originally Posted by Devius

Anyway, according to a recent "Vanity Fair" article, the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood’s biggest studios have agreed to meet for the first time in three months...

So, the year-long strike estimate that I've seen in so much reporting is still quite possible. Given that I've already seen quite a slowing of new streaming releases, this timeframe seems baken in to the industry's plans. When viewers come back from their summer camping trips, and start pushing the arrow buttons on their Roku remotes, and seeing nothing new, how severe with the backlash be?

Originally Posted by Devius

One small point: IMO, the success of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 shows there is still an appetite for the superhero genre - IF DONE RIGHT. Sadly though, this film and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (so far) appears to be exceptions to the recent offerings, which range from middling to "Meh" to outright dross (take a bow, Thor: Love and Thunder).

I don't follow every release in this genre, so I'm sure there are exceptions. It's just that I've noticed that over the past few years, the trend in the reviews within the superhero & fantasy genres, both on TV & in the theater, is increasingly negative.

Originally Posted by Gordon3

Amazon Prime: they've already cut back on original productions, even though a sequel to their disasterous Lord of the Rings show is supposedly still in the works. Their NFL contract hasn't moved the needle. I've noticed, and others have reported, that a lot of older shows have slowly disappeared from Prime, and moved over to the "FAST" services (ad-supported multiple live channel streaming). For books & audiobooks, Amazon already has pay-per-book services. Some analysts think that Prime video will move entirely to this model, with Prime subscribers getting a discount on "pay-per-shows".

Last night, I searched Amazon Prime for a couple of specific documentaries that used to be free with a Prime subscription. I had been a big Prime viewer, of documentaries & old movies, but that was in the 2018-2019 timeframe. Anyway, these were now behind a paywall, $2 per hour of show. LOL Obviously, with their Lord of the Rings series and Thursday Night Football each being billion-dollar debacles, Bezos is squeezing blood out of every turnip. Predictions of Amazon making Prime Video a pay-per-show platform are already coming true. If you're not a heavy Amazon shopper, then why bother?

Originally Posted by healthy_tatsu1

I hope the actors and writers get a better deal, both for their welfare and future quality of output - if these studios have free rein to crank out AI generated stuff they could REALLY crank out the average nonsense even moreso.

You're right, AI-generated content will be make the industry even more of a laughingstock. This is a super-technical article from a think-tank site called "Anti-Social Media: A Modest Proposal for Significant Restraint" (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2...ant-restraint/). Its thesis is that every social media post, and every YouTube & Tiktok video, is a form of marketing, which takes an enormous psychological toll on the user base, a significant finding if backed by further research.

But it was also good for a quote about the AI over-hype, since it has become a hot potato in Hollywood (translation below):

Large language models, of which ChatGPT is only the most recent (and most impressive) example, do not engage in communication in the linguistic sense of the term...But models like ChatGPT do not use words.., because they have access only to word forms and no concept of meaning at all. This is not evident to the layperson interacting with ChatGPT, but this model was trained on lots of human-generated text, from which it logged the probability that certain strings of word forms would occur together. This human-generated text is often gathered..., frequently by simply crawling the web...Given the appropriate stimulus, a language model of this kind will spin out word forms based on the complex probability matrices it has learned from its input text. But nowhere in this process is there anything approximating meaning. This is why it tends to “bullshit” and get certain questions wrong.

Occasionally, engineers in this space will claim that they have squared the circle and don’t need more than the word form...A moment’s reflection shows this is false. If this were true, archaeologists would have had no need for a Rosetta Stone to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics: The frequency with which the symbols appeared next to each other was already well-known and well-studied, but for some reason people seemed to still think they did not know what the symbols meant.

Language models like ChatGPT are stochastic parrots: parrots because they can only say something they have heard before, and stochastic because they combine sequences purely according to probabilistic rules. When a human being reads the output of this machine, generated by a prompt from the user, the human assumes that these are words which attach to meanings (and interpret them appropriately) and infers that they are engaged in a dialogue. This is an illusion. The machine is not producing words but only word forms. The human is the only entity assigning meanings here...It is a statistical trick built to look like it is a person engaging in a communicative act.

It may be very good for the companies marketing ChatGPT and similar products to make them appear to behave like people. The owners of these companies have even made bizarre claims that their products are perhaps too good, so good that it’s dangerous and may usher us into a science-fiction artificial intelligence revolution, as in blockbuster films like The Terminator or The Matrix. Naturally, this cool and edgy danger is not so severe that it has caused them to shut down access to their product, for which you can still purchase a monthly subscription.

tl;dr version: ChatGPT just has a really big list of words and phrases that appear next to other words and phrases it found on the web. Input one word or phrase, and it will regurgitate the neighboring words and phrases it has in its list. It has zero clue as to what anything on its list actually means.

Originally Posted by Devius

Thank you for an incisive and intelligent thread, and refreshingly free of "left v right political dogma"...

The facts speak for themeselves.

[Lisa Lipgloss]

Originally Posted by healthy_tatsu1

I hope the actors and writers get a better deal, both for their welfare and future quality of output - if these studios have free rein to crank out AI generated stuff they could REALLY crank out the average nonsense even moreso.

I agree they should be part of the future and better they strike now before AI gets beyond average nonsense. When I see AI-generated porn images I'm reminded of this from Monthy Python's Papperbok:



It also seems quite stylised, though few people complain about the Impressionists all being much of a muchness. It won't be long before AI can draw hands as well as Da Vinci. And if one can't tell the difference, is the viewing fulfillment diminished once the production process is revealed?

I also think if the creative minds can be replaced, then it can't be that difficult to replace the studio heads responsible for decision-making. They should be careful what they wish for.

[Mal Hombre]

Originally Posted by Lisa Lipgloss

I also think if the creative minds can be replaced, then it can't be that difficult to replace the studio heads responsible for decision-making. They should be careful what they wish for.

That's a very good point, An AI could run a studio at least as well the current crop..

[Gordon3]

I'm just posting to include some found insightful comments about the chickens coming home to roost in the entertainment business, from an article at https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023...ing-the-price/ .

Most of the comments with the article are basically "I'm going to start churning services, since prices are going up & content is going down." Thanks, do you want a cookie?

Anyway, while I've already posted a couple of these points already, read these comments instead:

The primary cause of all of this are studio executives who are stunningly bad at their jobs. Rampant unchecked capitalism aimed at gaming stock prices is why they're so bad at their jobs, but the root cause is that they just are terrible at the jobs they're supposed to be doing.

It was obvious to a great many people that every single studio locking their content behind exclusive paywalls was unsustainable before they even started doing it. Every single one of these companies started out with pricing that was completely unrealistic to maintain the infrastructure and the creation of new shows that they needed to make. The math just doesn't work. Heck back when this all started the "conventional wisdom" was that maybe - MAYBE - Disney could get away with it because they had so much content that families and rabid fanbases would both pay for.

Every single one of them bet that their "content" was going to be something that everyone couldn't live without. And it's just not true. They fractured their own market by deciding each one of them could be a top down monopoly on the creation, distribution, and direct-to-customer streaming of their shows. But they're incompetent at it and, what's more, that model comes with tons of opportunity costs of not being able to get cheap money by licensing existing content to other people to stream. Instead they have to do it all.

One of the best things that could happen right now for the industry is if Disney, Warner-Discovery, and Paramount all took a step back, announced they were ending their studio exclusive platforms, and either shutting down their services entirely or spinning them off into standalone companies that focus just on streaming and then let them compete amongst themselves for content with the studios able to sell to any of them and let the best run companies survive. The market cannot sustain more than 2-3 high cost streaming services - it certainly can't sustain 6+ of them. There just isn't enough money to be spent on subscriptions or even advertising to keep a market that fractured afloat. And the studios need to be focusing on creating shows far more than maintaining a streaming infrastructure.

This was an enevitability. No one is profitable except Netflix, and the networks have been subsidising the costs for the users for years now. It's Venture Capitalism 101 - we've seen the same thing with Uber, Lyft, and all the food delivery services.

I wanted to say that the major networks all were suckered into fighting a land war in Asia against Netflix, but it's really much more like Vietnam. Disney, NBC, CBS thought they could paradrop in and declare victory, but running a streaming catalogue is much more complicated and expensive than their shareholders realized.

[Gordon3]

The tech "journalism" sites are in varying stages of grief over their beloved streaming services, sobbing over the end of Hollywood as they have come to know and love it. While there have been a number of pieces over the past couple of weeks, an article on Techdirt actually gets at some of the causes, rather than just whining (https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/14/...ng-crackdowns/). (I like that word, enshittification; it is the perfect word to encapsulate modern capitalism and the entire Reagan/Thatcher Era.) Unfortunately, like all tech media, their head is firmly ensconced in their rectum, so they don't realize how dissatisfied the general public is and how bad the revolt is going to be.

Ultimately, content companies thought they were tech companies, and tried to grow fast through attractive pricing. This strategy assumed that they would put out a lineup of great shows to appeal to wide audiences. What did we get instead? Prestige TV. For example, Succession, a show about a bunch of assholes, with one slightly bigger asshole, just like all of the reality television of the past three decades.

A couple of quotes from the head writer on some AppleTV+ show, which shows that the sides in both strikes are still very far apart:

In their mad rush off the digital cliff, these companies transformed Hollywood from a high-wage, high-profit, hits-driven industry into a low-wage, low-profit, subscription-driven one. They also broke the basic bargain at the heart of show business, which is that creative artists and independent producers will share in the financial success their work creates.

Unregulated platform capitalism has already chewed up and spat out most of the 20th century’s once-profitable culture industry, from music to journalism to books. People often blame “the internet” for this rampant destruction of livelihoods, as if the technology itself were some kind of demon, hellbent on erasing the value of creative work.

Then, there is a bunch of pie-in-the-sky thinking that regulating the Internet will fix the problem by ending consolidation, like that will ever happen. The only way out is through massive shutdowns & bankruptcies and collective bargaining. The music industry has shrank by 1/3 over the last 20 years, and the same will happen to traditional video entertainment & sports, if not to a larger degree. Why?

On the demand side, the actually important side, you've got streaming services, broadcast networks, cable channels, and a near infinite inventory of YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and even Tiktok videos, a very saturated situation, indeed. (Although, big YouTubers & podcasters can survive a long time as they can easily lower costs to deal with lower revenue.)

On the supply side, advertisers are pulling back & paying less. Investors are no longer throwing money at the sector. Loans are more expensive because of interest rate hikes. Inflation is causing production costs to go through the roof. Plus, there's the other previously mentioned issues, such as the costs of going direct-to-consumer and the fact that revenue per household is 1/6 of that of traditional methods.

Settling these strikes will only add to the costs. Not settling will cause the clock on the time bomb to tick faster, as cancellations will flood in.

The producers thought that viewers would pony up to watch every show that some random acquaintance mentioned was great. Producers thought that viewers would go right back to paying the $50, $100, $150, $200 per month "Hollywood Tax". Producers thought that viewers would go right back to the bundle and pay for stuff that they don't watch. Every producer thought that viewers couldn't live without them, a dangerous notion.

Instead, viewers have only been trained to churn and to do without. To make a profit in the future, a content owner will have to have low costs and access to a large audience base, such as, one or two paid streaming services plus FAST apps, or an ad-supported platform that can be accessed by a sufficiently broad set of viewers (broadcast television).