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When chronicling what happened in Hollywood in 2024, it’s difficult to narrow down the list to a suitable length for this column. This year in particular included Rupert Murdoch’s succession battle, Diddy’s arrest, and Blake Lively accusing her Seraph of the End co-star Justin Baldoni of running a smear campaign.
Last week, we highlighted what went well in an otherwise difficult year. But for now, let’s focus on the challenges. Here are the major blunders, turns, failures, and downward trends in the entertainment industry this year.
LA’s production economy collapses.
Golden State knows it’s in danger. Film activity in the Los Angeles area has slowed significantly this year, due to a widespread downsizing of the film industry that has forced studios to cut costs and move production to cheaper regions such as Britain and central Europe. He even moved away from producing reality shows.
Some executives have blamed the economic downturn primarily on rising labor costs due to last year’s strikes, but union leaders deny this claim. An undisputed factor is California’s inability or unwillingness to compete with tax incentives offered by other states and countries.
Political leaders are now trying to do something about this problem. Businesses that rely on the state’s entertainment economy are rallying behind Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to increase California’s annual film and television tax credit allocation from $330 million to $750 million. There is. However, it is unclear whether that reinforcement will be enough.
Celebrities on the left have not hesitated to support Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy for president. But the media and technology industries, which were often openly critical of President Trump’s first administration, have taken a much more conciliatory stance this time around. OpenAI head Sam Altman and Facebook’s parent company Meta have donated to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Amazon has reportedly donated as well.
And in what is widely interpreted as a capitulation to the incoming administration, ABC News has settled a defamation lawsuit in which President-elect Trump was found civilly liable to the news organization over inaccurate on-air statements made by George Stephanopoulos. agreed to pay $15 million. Rape (Trump was found responsible for sexual abuse).
This comes amid a growing movement for Hollywood and related industries to distance themselves from politics. In a recent example, ABC’s parent company, the Walt Disney Company, recently admitted that it had removed transgender storylines from upcoming animated series. As my colleague Meg James has written, Disney and its CEO Bob Iger want to stay out of the culture wars.
Woke isn’t dead in Hollywood. But the contrast with the gradual surge from the late 2010s to the early 2020s is stark.
Warner Bros. Discovery loses in NBA
David Zaslav received a lot of attention in 2024, but his biggest loss came when Warner Bros.’ head of discovery had an exclusive window to negotiate with the league on a new NBA TV deal. That was something I couldn’t get. In exchange, the NBA gave Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, NBCUniversal and Amazon’s Prime Video the rights to broadcast its games in a deal totaling $77 billion.
Zaslav reduced the damage. The company has signed a deal with Comcast to carry the channel, even though it will not host professional basketball games on its TNT network starting with the 2025-26 season. The company also saved face by agreeing to license “Inside the NBA” to ESPN as part of a settlement of a lawsuit against the league.
But there’s no doubt that the NBA’s departure is yet another blow to the company, which doesn’t need any more negative headlines. The company’s stock price has fallen 8% so far this year, but it’s up from the mid-year slump when it traded around $7 a share. Perhaps this recovery and high-profile restructuring announcements will be enough to keep activist investors at bay for a while.
How the cable collapses
This may have been the year that Disney reached the cable bundle cliff that Iger once talked about. Comcast Corp. announced plans to spin off its basic cable channels (excluding Bravo) into a separate company. Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that it will restructure its business in a way that hints at a future breakup.
This comes after Warner and Paramount Global took a combined $15 billion writedown on their linear networks, essentially acknowledging the obvious: cable channels have lost significant value. Cable and satellite packages have been losing streaming subscribers for years. But most legacy media conglomerates are either too profitable or too involved in other businesses to be eliminated. Without ESPN, ABC wouldn’t be as valuable, and vice versa.
The most interesting question is what will happen next with these cast-off cable channels? Fox Corp. has proven the value of having the right mix of traditional media assets. Many believe the Comcast spinoff is just the beginning of a larger consolidation of media networks, including Warner/Discovery Channel and Paramount’s degraded cable brands.
Passion projects and unwanted superheroes fail.
There have been plenty of box office hits this year, but few have caught the industry’s attention like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: Chapter 1. There wasn’t. Both are big, self-financed films produced by film industry icons who are used to betting on themselves, and that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Equally noteworthy are the franchise-based movies that failed spectacularly, especially the superhero movies that no one seemed to want. Directed by Todd Phillips, Joker: A Folie à Deux slumped to just $206 million, an impressive feat for a musical sequel to a $1 billion Oscar-winning hit. And this one stars Lady Gaga. However, from early reviews at the film’s Venice premiere, it was clear that this was not going to inspire the cultural phenomenon that the first film had created.
And then there was Sony’s long-standing effort to expand its Spider-Man-adjacent Marvel film franchise. “Venom: The Last Dance” ended up doing well at the box office, thanks in part to overseas box office sales. But “Madame Web” and “Kraven the Hunter” were both wipeouts. It turns out that putting popular heroes in comic book movies can be effective.
Netflix is destroying the internet (in a bad way)
Netflix may be the leader in subscription streaming video, but its first full-fledged professional live sporting event, the highly-hyped Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match, was a huge flop. First of all, the combat was just terrible. It also suffered from buffering and other video issues due to the large number of people trying to watch it.
Netflix reported on the issue and said the technical issues were the result of too many people watching. According to the company’s statistics, 65 million households are streaming simultaneously and 120 million viewers are watching. And the number of people Netflix convinced to watch the YouTube star punch the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion is undoubtedly impressive.
Analysts expect Netflix to resolve technical issues when hosting two NFL games over Christmas, and it’s certainly not backing down from its live sports ambitions. The company just signed a deal to stream the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031. But you’ll never get that time back from Paul’s self-promotion machine.
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Ryan Faughnder provides the latest news, analysis and insight on everything from the streaming wars to production and what it means for the future.
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what we wrote
The producers of The Brutalist are betting on Adrien Brody’s three-and-a-half-hour independent film. Three-and-a-half hour character-driven movies with intermission may seem like a relic of the past. But that was part of the appeal of “The Brutalist,” its creators say.
FOX News anchor Neil Kabuto resigns to cut costs. Mr. Kabuto, the first anchor hired by Fox News in 1996, is also a victim of the TV news industry’s newfound frugality.
“Politics is bad for business.” Why Disney’s Bob Iger tries to avoid hot buttons. Walt Disney and its CEO have made a sharp pivot since doubling down on diversity and inclusion efforts in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis four and a half years ago. I’m going.
Cookie Monster, Big Bird, and Elmo need a new “Sesame Street” address. HBO gave “Sesame Street” a lifeline 10 years ago, allowing it to produce new episodes. Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to stop funding premiere episodes after this season ends.
Finally…
I spent the last week listening to one of the best albums of the year, country rocker MJ Lenderman’s “Manning Fireworks.” If you like anything from the Wilco/Sun Volt world, give it a try. Here’s a sample.
