Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge Sept 16, 2023
In the past, the film industry was perhaps the only industry (besides politics) in which abject failure has been met with consumer empathy and largesse. 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. Though writers and actors might garner more sympathy than producers and CEOs due to concerns over AI, the threat of AI formulated screenplays is greatly overblown and AI generated proxies of famous actors are not going to bring back audiences in sufficient numbers to save the film industry anyway.
The strikes are seen as the last gasp of a dying institution, an institution that deserves to be cremated and replaced by a decentralized network of true creatives making content with substance and intelligence. The real reason for the death of Hollywood is simple, and it’s a truth that the media will never admit to: Get woke, go broke. As a reminder, let’s take a look at the plethora of woke failures Hollywood produced in 2022 alone…
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Woke propaganda and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) ideology are the root cause of the implosion of showbiz. There is an inherent hostility within woke culture towards American heritage, towards constitutional freedoms, towards free markets and towards legitimate imagination and creativity. This hostility and deconstruction is not lost on the average consumer, they know when they are being attacked and they don’t like it.
Beyond the industry’s attempts to “count coup” against the conservative and moderate population, there is the basic matter of content quality. If the top priority of a creative endeavor is to implant extremist political messaging rather than tell a good story, it will be virtually impossible to tell a good story and the industry will attract the worst kinds of zealots.
The survival of Hollywood now relies on their ability to accept failure and recognize their mistakes, which will never happen.
It’s not surprising that media simpletons are currently clinging to a movie like Barbie as a sample of woke success; they’re desperate for a counter-argument to the Get Woke, Go Broke mantra. That said, exceptions to the rule do not change the rule. For every Barbie, there are a dozen Little Mermaid or Woman King bombs. And, Barbie was never marketed as a woke film (except in Australia). In fact, it was marketed as a normal romantic comedy romp in the US, something which female audiences have been clamoring for (how many decent romantic comedies has Hollywood released in the past 5 years? Why have there been so few? Is it because the far-left hates love stories about straight people?).
They had to hide the feminist cancer in order to get butts in the theater. Hardly a shining example of woke success. Barbie/Oppenheimer were likely the last hurrah for Hollywood as the strikes continue unabated and productions are pushed further into oblivion. All the parties involved in these strikes are responsible for their dwindling piece of the entertainment pie. The writers are garbage, the actors are garbage, the production companies are garbage. It would appear that consumers have decided it’s time to put the garbage where it belongs – In the dustbin.
there is a london tattooist named Chris Spivey who has tattooed numbers on the arms
of jews in their 40s and 50s
so they can claim holocaust money
the war ended 85 years ago
this guy ellis taylor exposed spivey as anti semitic
but the fact is he was right what he said jews not even alive then are claiming holocaust money
Who is this Tyler Durden?
As usual, Durden, of should I say the CIA writing pool, are wrong.
Long before woke was thrust to the forefront, Hollywood was dead. All we got for over 20yrs were shocker films, and Rocky to 100 flicks. Countless moronic 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on, and in most cases, they never matched the original.
We see the same on TV. Shit drama’s, shit brainwashing police state farces, or mind numbing quizzes. Maybe you like Prancing on Ice, or Strictly Bonking?
The Hollywood move into woke is it’s last gasp before LA and Hollywood gets nuked or radioactively tsunamied.
There are some decent sheeple in Hollywood, but they don’t live there. But they are few and far between and there are getting on.
So Hollywood had nowhere to go, but down the pan. The ‘writing’ (pun intended) was on the wall decades ago, and another major clue as to end of creativity, actors and writers are up in arms about AI scripts. If you are a studio boss, and you choose an AI script, what does that show you, what they think about thicko sheeple?
Like PJW, you’re a fool if you think woke destroyed Hollywood. Hollywood died decades ago.
The premise of this article, like all like it, relies on believing the idea of making films now is to return a profit – it doesn’t. The same goes for the multitude of advertisement for widgets that are actually advertising mixed race marriage. They too only have a secondary motivation in returning a “profit”.
The world is so corporatised that individual named entities — Hollywood, oven chips, DFS sofas, holiday companies etc — are like units of an army designated for kamikaze campaigns to deliver social engineering messages while going down in flames…
Individual enterprises, like Hollywood, are like individual nations. A profit of a company or nation is secondary to the geopolitical returns to the overall enterprise, inclusive of corporations designated as “banks”. To focus only on Hollywood is like focusing on “Ukraine”, or “Russia”, or the “USA” as though they are distinct entities in no way connected by transnationalist interests. Current affairs are continually viewed with outdated optics.
Why do these outdated optics still exist?
Is it because the desire to feel schadenfreude towards a despicable industry would not be so keenly felt if it was acknowledged they are regarded as disposable by TPTB in any case?
It was a hundred years of dominance, built on “glamour” (opposite of substance) and it takes time for them to see that it failed, or else succeeded so well that American culture is dead and needs nothing more to feed on
More like the toilet. Flush them down.
It doesn’t matter, since the Federal Reserve subsidizes all these movies studios & corporations. So no matter how much money they ‘lose’ via their anti-white Commie propaganda–the Fed reimburses them so they can stay in business & continue producing their Marxist garbage. Now you know.
If Hollywood has done nothing else, it has taught the rest of the world to speak ‘Merican.
Surely garbage belongs in a trashcan, not a dustbin?
Tape runs out, illuminati card game.is the reality show ‘earth’ over?is that why the writers guild and actors union are on strike ?
Good riddance
Nico X : wrong, Hollywood blockbusters are still in the red, bust movies which have made billions, but never pay a cent in taxes.
Hollywood has always been a midden of depravity. By their deeply putrefying prerogatives, the Californian film studios, have sought to inculcate a judeo-luciferic iconography within the christian nations, purposed to a rewriting of the archetypes of the western mind.
Instead of Prometheus, there’s Marlon Brando. Instead of Diana and Artemis, there’s Jayne Mansfield. Instead of Hercules, there’s, erm…er…Arnold Schwartzenegger. Instead of the Vestal Virgins, there’s Jenna Jameson.
It is to the root core of European tradition that the spellcraft of Hollywood’s black magicians penetrates.
Francis Ford Coppola is a true artist and I still have the utmost respect for him. If any of you have seen the director’s cut of The Godfather Part II, with the deleted scenes of Hyman Roth as a boy, when Don Vito gives the destitute jewish kid his first job and takes him under his wing, as one of his own family, it becomes clear that Coppola is calling the jew out for his treachery. That couldn’t be allowed. In the theatrical cut, you’re led to believe that the antagonism between Vito Corleone and Hyman Roth is about competing business interests.
No, Hyman Roth was a guttersnipe jewish traitor, who tried to kill the only man who’d ever helped him during his childhood.
I dont care about the CIA/Mossad propaganda
institution . GO TO HELL !
@Carl Jones–Wrong. The Fed subsidizes Hollywood.
I’ve worked in Hollywood. I kept forgetting where I was and thinking I was in Israel. I’m not kidding.
Amongst all the worthy comments, Andyay delivers substance.
I am and always was, a movie anti-fan, that is to say, even before it dawned on me that the entire Hollywood swindle was an elaborately conceived and managed effort to massively delude, misinform and ultimately cripple gentile ability or even desire for critical thought, inquiry and synthesis, I had no special urge to watch anything at all. Quick look, brief enjoyment, laugh and even quicker memory dump.
That said, there was one movie that stands alone in my mind as what I would consider art—the magical, ineffable Don’t Look Now directed by Nicolas Roeg.
There were other notable attempts by such as Sam Peckinpah, Andrei Tarkovsky and Akira Kurosawa … but having seen so few and remembered much fewer, I am no expert—just saying.
What they all have in antisemitic common is that they emphasize morality psychodramas, of honor and spirituality (yes, Peckinpah too).
ardua per praeceps gloria vadit iter, something that Sauron’s enslaved, soulless orc can never grasp in futility of his transhumanist fantasies (be rich and live forever, wallowing in favorite perversions)
@ lobro
Love you, Lobro.
My favourite film director is Andrei Tarkovsky. His best movie, I think, is “Stalker” (pronounced something like, “stulkier,” in Russian, meaning, “tracker” or “forward huntsman.”)
I don’t know of any modern director, other than Tarkovsky, whose movies are viewable over and again, whilst continuing to resonate with new perspectives and previously missed poetic subtleties, each time. He was the only cinema auteur, I know of, whose concern was wholly with the subconscious.
Andrei Tarkovsky made Stanley Kubrick look like a bland simpleton.
@andyay,
Well, thanks for kindness, and genuine to boot, an all too rare windfall.
The Tarkovsky film that sticks in memory, I think was called Hurricane (?) but thanks to your suggestion, I now have the Stalker in sights, will pop that youtube window as soon as I can put aside 3 unmolested hours.
Even in my wooded cottage, privacy flows interrupted, which makes it that much more desirable.
Chores to do, odds and ends, visits by my Thai-Aussie landlord, the sweetest, most helpful person but whose interests run along a different track, he being a gregarious sort cannot find anyone else worth talking to—if only I could reciprocate to find him worth listening to—a most unfair, shameful thought but sadly true.
And the blessing/curse of dyslexic scatterbrain scattering like a well concealed IED … if I had any appreciable wealth, I would sue myself.
I did have a measure of liking for Kubrick and always felt that he was geo-fenced by his Jewishness, the ring of Talmudism through the nose limiting his range—he knew it, I think and it made him morose.