2020 was a rough year for Hollywood. Like most industries, the COVID pandemic took its toll.
Unfortunately for the entertainment industry, things still haven’t quite recovered as many had hoped.
2023’s box office was riddled with massive financial failures. The streaming model for television is collapsing in real time. Union strike after union strike has bundled up productions with all sorts of regulatory costs.
Thanks to those factors and many more, the industry has finally hit its breaking point.
Speaking with Deadline, one unnamed “veteran top TV executive” explained exactly how drastic the situation is: “I’ve seen lots of downturns, lots of job losses but I’ve never seen anything like this… This is a full-scale depression for the entertainment industry.”
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Each one of Hollywood’s Big Five major studios — Walt Disney Studios, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. — has issued waves of layoffs over the past year.
But it didn’t stop there.
Other entertainment giants — namely Netflix, Fifth Season, Lionsgate and Amazon MGM Studios — as well as several talent agencies, have been laying off scores of employees also.
The TV executive mentioned above claims that his or her own LinkedIn circle has turned into little more than a “therapy site for unemployed entertainment executives” frustrated by the industry’s contractions.
Does Hollywood deserve this?
According to Deadline, many such executives have sent out hundreds of job applications to studios across the industry, in many cases never even receiving a response.
The layoffs and endless job hunts aren’t just plaguing executives at the top, however.
Actors, writers and other lower-level employees are feeling the hurt as well.
The industry went into overdrive to produce all sorts of content for a handful of large streaming services just a few years ago. But now, that demand for content has dried up.
A February report claims that, just a decade ago around that time, 100 television productions would be casting for pilots.
This year, that number was down to 3, a 97 percent reduction.
The goal of many of the recent Hollywood strikes was to turn acting, writing and other mid-to-lower-level entertainment industry positions into viable, long-term careers that could support a family.
Instead, by driving up already skyrocketing production costs already exacerbated by inflation, those strikes may have helped turn Hollywood into a gig economy.
In other words, going forward, lower-level actors and writers need to find a day job. Apparently, so do many former industry executives.
