The major woes facing Hollywood are the movie industry’s worst-kept secret. But did A list director Steven Spielberg deliver a grim prophecy over a decade ago that predicted Hollywood’s implosion?
A series of interviews the Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan director gave in 2013 suggest a surprising answer.
Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an “implosion” in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever.
I’d consider actors who’d made a living by their craft until recently having to take jobs as Uber drivers a significant alteration.
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George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.
George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.
Lucas and Spielberg told USC students that they are learning about the industry at an extraordinary time of upheaval, where even proven talents find it difficult to get movies into theaters. Some ideas from young filmmakers “are too fringe-y for the movies,” Spielberg said. “That’s the big danger, and there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”
Lucas lamented the high cost of marketing movies and the urge to make them for the masses while ignoring niche audiences. He called cable television “much more adventurous” than film nowadays.
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Spielberg added that he had to co-own his own studio in order to get Lincoln into theaters.
“The pathway to get into theaters is really getting smaller and smaller,” Lucas said.
Threre or four megabudget bombs, he said?
- The Marvels
- The Flash
- Wish
- Indiana Jones 5
That’s just in 2023, ten years after Spielberg issued his Hollywood propehcy.
And we could name more.
What can’t continue won’t continue.
Some say the sky is falling, but I don’t interpret Spielberg’s Hollywood prophecy as apocalyptic.
Instead, it’s the result of Hollywood’s decades-long degeneration from chasing dollars to pushing nihilistic propaganda.
Now that the disintegration of Western society—due in large part to the entertainment industry—has hit critical mass, there isn’t enough social cohesion to sustain a culture-wide hit.
That’s why it’s getting harder and harder for movies to make it to theaters even as theater revenues drop. There are no movies that everyone goes to see anymore.
Nor are is there a next generation of directors being prepped to succeed the likes of Spielberg and Lucas on the radar.
Hollywood has no bench and, increasingly, no audience. Its career-making power is about tapped out.
Again, I don’t foresee doomsday for the film industry; more like a drastic upheaval of a kind we haven’t since since the 1970s. Only this time it migyht proceed in a good direction.
That means the aspiring class of professional film makers should bide their time, hone their craft, and build their platforms.
Time has proven Spielberg right. The old paradigm is imploding. We need talented creators waiting in the wings to step in and rebuild.
And a key strategy for doing that reconstruction will be leveraging Neopatronage.
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As a developing animator myself, I plan to get around the marketing aspect of film by hitting film festivals. There are plenty throughout my home state which seem to still be active and there are some elsewhere in the US I can enter too. The price I’d pay for the PR and building an audience is the cost of entry into the festival.
The means for film makers to get their names out there aren’t exclusive to the slog of social media. Film festivals are still out there and that system still exists to give artists a chance to elevate themselves. I use https://filmfreeway.com/ to search for film contests. Maybe my fellow readers will find it useful as well, be it to enter their own works or find someone to support.
A lot of people got really upset when Scorsese said Marvel movies weren’t film but formula, but that is the only reason they lasted as long as they did. They found a way to appeal to the rapidly disintegrating audience by focusing on enough vague similarities westerners still had with each other. But even that couldn’t last and was already in collapse before the last Avengers movie came out. I’ve still never seen Endgame and still have no desire to.
You can’t create art with wide appeal if there is nothing connecting the audience together anymore. It was like Devon Stack said in his Beekeeper review: as the audience gets vague and hard to define, you have to aim lower and make movies dumber to make sure it hits as many different demographics as possible. This isn’t sustainable, but it is the logical end state of an industry that chose to hate their audience.
I don’t think film will ever entirely disappear, but mainstream blockbusters are over and will be very long time. You could make a film like Dirty Harry or Death Wish in the 1970s because the audience could still understand them. Today, Hollywood would get slaughtered by their own for putting out something like that.
This is why we need alternatives. We need ambitious independents like Sam Raimi or Don Coscarelli again willing do what the majors can’t. We don’t need more generic Hollywood product.
Well said. I was listening to Generation Video’s episode on Spider-Man (2002). The Millennial host was astonished to learn that Marvel had handed the reins of their flagship IP to former struggling film students who made their bones cobbling together no-budget horror shlock. The Gen X host lamented that Raimi’s modern-day equivalents won’t get the same shot he did.
Oh, the occasional breakout like Top Gun 2 or that one child trafficking movie show that people still go to the movies. They want to be entertained. It’s just that Hollywood doesn’t want to make those movies anymore, and they browbeat people who do. Spielburg’s remark about “young filmmakers want to make stuff that is too fringe-y” is very telling. You know what is considered ‘fringe-y’? Military scifi made for young white males. That’s what they told Nick Cole when he tried to get Galaxy’s Edge made into a movie. So I applaud their downfall and continue to support small creators. Kamen America went viral in Japan last week and their comics became bestsellers on Amazon Japan. When asked when an anime is forthcoming, the community manager replied with a winking emoji. So who knows?