Run theaters like startups desperately fighting to win an audience, not ancient monopolists collecting their vig.Ĭollect data and market to it, through theaters or social media or elsewhere. They don't need laser shows, but Disney and Universal should at least expect people seeing their movies be treated like they treat guests in their parks: clean cinemas, no giant status-stratified lines for popcorn. The studios should build a handful of theaters to test out what they can do with the movie-going experience, even if it’s just to push theaters to innovate.Įxhibition either needs to step up and start giving patrons a better experience than they can get at home or the studios need to buy up the chains. Put the skunkworks somewhere far off the lot so they aren’t sucked into by the bureaucratic inertia of the studios. Hire and promote people based on their track record not their resumes.Įstablish a skunkworks at every studio with the mandate to do the things that are verboten everywhere else on the lot. We'll need a bunch of them probably to make things work. Some are prosaic and common-sensical, others are the stuff of a wild man in the forest yelling at trees.īut given where we are, given the stakes are really that high, and given how deep we're stuck in the old clumsy-don't-make-waves way of doing business, it's a good moment to stop and seriously consider some wild and ridiculous ideas. So here are our 50 suggestions to save Hollywood. But as the news of the past few months has gone from ghastly to cataclysmic, we've felt a strange urge for a little change of tone. The Ankler has long made clear that we're not in the solutions business: We're very happy with our role of finger-pointing and name-calling, thank you very much. When an industry that includes all of the nation's talent is unable to find someone willing to host its annual gala, you wouldn't be completely off in space to take that as a harbinger of some sort. So taken all together, what do you call that? A heart attack wrapped inside a nervous breakdown? In any event, it's enough that the question-can Hollywood really make it through all this? -is not just academic anymore. And finally the Black Lives Matter moment, bringing attention to Hollywood's dismal record on racial matters, on camera and off. An international plague that hit not only our ability to show films but our ability to make them, as well as crippling many other ways our great diversified studios could make money.
Constant social-media fueled upheaval over matters both giant and puny. The disappearance of one of Hollywood's six legacy studios. Then there was the full blown rise of the Great Streaming War which everyone had to go all in on, despite no clear answer to the notion that we were racing over a cliff.
Then on top of that, we got the Harvey revelations, the Me Too uprising, and the first time the moguls were held accountable for their behavior in Hollywood history. All of which already had everyone in a state of terror and confusion. Plus there was the theatrical decline, competition from the internet, piracy, new international producers, the burgeoning collapse of the bundle, continuing evidence that a generation or two were turning away from movies and maybe even TV shows and we might never get them back. Way back two years ago, the entire town was in terror over the rise of streaming with its new (and completely unstable) financial models and culty techno ways of relating to the creative side. In many ways, Hollywood has been the petri dish for the problems that have pushed America to the edge today, and our collapse has got a couple of years head start on the country's. On another, everything seems on the brink of absolutely falling apart. Does Hollywood need saving? On one level, Hollywood-produced entertainments (aka content) has never been more widely seen and enjoyed.
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