by Tyler Durden

 Ever since the days of the Great Depression, the American public has wanted Hollywood to succeed; to continue to entertain us with tales of adventure and drama.  For if Hollywood survived, so did people's hopes for American culture.  

There was an era when Hollywood celebrities and film creators were treated as a kind of modern royalty, a representation of the heights to which the average person could strive and "make it big."  The glitz and the glamour were viewed as the culmination of the American dream.  But as with all fantasies, the story must end and reality must return.  Was the movie business always a farce?  Yes.  However, it was a farce that the public held up even in the worst of times as something of value; something more than frivolity.  

In the spans of around 7 years Hollywood has lost every ounce of social capital they had gained in the past century.  That takes an epic level of ignorance and arrogance.  It takes criminal levels of malicious intent and an unprecedented display of stupidity.  The populace was willing to put up with almost any level of degeneracy from Tinsel Town as long as they could make compelling movies, and yet, they couldn't even do that

Today, the consequences of their hubris are punching them right in the nether regions as the business collapses in on itself.  And this time, no one seems to care.  In fact, many people are cheering their inevitable demise.

In the past 4 years alone theaters across the country have seen a 50% plunge in box office attendance.  Meaning, the industry somehow lost half its consumer base from 2019 to 2023.  The media attempted to play down the crash as a symptom of the covid pandemic, but the fact is that the decline started well before the lockdowns, the closures in red states ended quickly, and some movies (such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick) had explosive success while most other films lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the midst of the covid hype.

It should be noted that a large percentage of celebrities and Hollywood corporate interests supported and promoted the covid lockdowns.  They also joined the online lynch mobs seeking to shame and destroy anyone who defied the mandates.  Now they're pretending like none of that ever happened, but the public has not forgotten.    

In the past few months Hollywood has been dealing with the WGA and SAG worker strikes and there's no doubt they will attempt to blame the labor conflict for the continuing decay of profits just as they blamed covid.  Already, multiple major studio productions have been pushed back two years or canceled altogether, and most premier release dates have been moved to 2024 – 2025.  A number of television productions have been shut down and late night talk shows are on the verge of extinction.  But you don't hear the public complain much, at least not as much as during the last major strikes in 2008.    

No one cares about the writers, no one cares about the actors, and certainly no one cares about the studios for good reason.