I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV 20 years ago. I had Netflix until they switched to their own content and started raising rates, so I dropped it. I now rent DVDs from a place about 15 minutes from. I also have Kanopy for free. Here’s the opinion: stop watching. That’s the only way to send a message. Read a book. Rent a dvd. Or play a game. Or draw. Or visit friends and play board games. Or learn to play an instrument. Or find a game store near you and go to game nights. Or bowl. Find something else to do than drool at a screen watching content product that doesn’t give a shit about.
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).
Costs aren't just up on the shocks of this year. The daily production of all diesel and jet fuel per capita has been declining month on month since 2008.
The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.
It's got good content but also a massive amount of slop. You don't see much straight up AI generated video, but it's incredibly common to see youtubers just sitting there reading a ChatGPT script.
I'm not who you're replying to, but I tuned out big movies and TV long ago, and just recently, YouTube became a hostile enough environment for me to start limiting it. When I do go there, it's to watch specific channels I already know. Clickbait titles and slop suggestions just aren't worth the psycholigical hassle when I want to relax.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time. I used to be a big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at some point they both started producing Platform Content and in response, I haven't watched anything from either for about a decade now.
Being all in on AI doesnt mean they have to be all in on bottom of the barrel slop videos. Youtube actually does a great job of not serving you slop if it gets to know you well enough. And it does notify you if it detects the video is AI generated. I would hope tech companies are awake to the fact that people’s feeds being deluged by the absolute uncanniest and disturbing visuals you’ve ever seen is feeding into anti-AI sentiment, and they probably shouldn’t be further enabling that.
There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
No one has any money and entertainment is the first thing you cut.
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
and the content strangely sucks most of the time. like no one can write, edit, direct, or act anymore. Not always but strangely often.
Every thing is safe.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
Well it's shot on a phone, lit with bad LED lighting and edited on a laptop. It all shows in the final product.
I feel like this comment contrasted with the incredible movie releases this since ~May is just not holding water.
Which of these movies would you say are good? I haven't been following up with releases but would like to watch something worthwhile.
It felt like there were years where good movies like stopped being made. Or just contrasted with years filled with good movies.
What came out this year that you think you'll watch again in 10 years?
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
I believe its called South America now.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV 20 years ago. I had Netflix until they switched to their own content and started raising rates, so I dropped it. I now rent DVDs from a place about 15 minutes from. I also have Kanopy for free. Here’s the opinion: stop watching. That’s the only way to send a message. Read a book. Rent a dvd. Or play a game. Or draw. Or visit friends and play board games. Or learn to play an instrument. Or find a game store near you and go to game nights. Or bowl. Find something else to do than drool at a screen watching content product that doesn’t give a shit about.
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm
How dare you bring facts and data to a fight based on vibes!
Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
Without even looking at the data, I bet both of your hypotheses here are wrong.
I bet the median American has more real disposable income than four years ago.
I bet the median American spends more in real terms on entertainment (and streaming specifically) than four years ago.
Almost without fail, the data in almost any area of modern life seems to be way less negative than people’s vibes about it are.
I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).
"You're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment." - Bob Jordan, CEO of Southwest Airlines, April 23rd
"We've finally gone too far on pricing" is a wild thing to hear a CEO say out loud in 2026.
It's not that the prices are up to milk the consumer. Look at Southwest's thin profit margin. Costs are up
Costs aren't just up on the shocks of this year. The daily production of all diesel and jet fuel per capita has been declining month on month since 2008.
The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.
Jet fuel has more than doubled in cost just this year. That wasn't in anyone's plans.
Have you seen media, arts and film that America produces recently? It's garbage.
I can't watch youtube due to all these garbage. Youtube should allow me to blanket ban on publisher who use full AI for full video.
Ironically I find that YouTube has the absolute best content. It's the only one with authentic people making quality stuff for exactly your niche.
That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.
It's got good content but also a massive amount of slop. You don't see much straight up AI generated video, but it's incredibly common to see youtubers just sitting there reading a ChatGPT script.
"In this video I'm going to..."
"Let me tell you why!"
"Is not X, it's Y!"
and so on. It's so tiresome. I can't stand AI scripts. It makes the entire video feel like a waste of my time.
I just stopped using YouTube for entertainment years ago. Try it!
(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.
Where do you find entertainment now?
I just listen to one of many of the voices in my head and see what they have to suggest. Things get interesting
I'm not who you're replying to, but I tuned out big movies and TV long ago, and just recently, YouTube became a hostile enough environment for me to start limiting it. When I do go there, it's to watch specific channels I already know. Clickbait titles and slop suggestions just aren't worth the psycholigical hassle when I want to relax.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time. I used to be a big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at some point they both started producing Platform Content and in response, I haven't watched anything from either for about a decade now.
They can't, as far as organizational politics goes. Tech is all in on AI.
Being all in on AI doesnt mean they have to be all in on bottom of the barrel slop videos. Youtube actually does a great job of not serving you slop if it gets to know you well enough. And it does notify you if it detects the video is AI generated. I would hope tech companies are awake to the fact that people’s feeds being deluged by the absolute uncanniest and disturbing visuals you’ve ever seen is feeding into anti-AI sentiment, and they probably shouldn’t be further enabling that.
Vague takes like this scream Facebook boomer. There's lots of great media and lots of bad media. It's the nature of trying to monetize creativity.
What does this mean “to monetize creativity”?
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
Tell me more, 5 hour old account
There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
“Only” 1 to 3 MCU movies a year? This is an absurd amount of junk.
Interest rates and inflation have vastly more impact than AI.
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
Before I dive into a relatively long article here, can someone tell me if it does, in fact, say how much is AI?
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
Yeah but the total hours of content produced are way up. Most video content that needs to be produced and is consumed nowadays isn't movies.
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
Based on the rise of short form video content, this seems like amateurs are just outcompeting professionals for eyeballs.
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
The other night I watched a team of 4 dudes row from America to Europe. In a row boat. No sails. Makes me think of the Tom Hanks quote:
> What actually happened is cooler than what could happen
It’s hard to think of a fictional story that beats actually rowing across the world.
I find it odd that this article ignores live theater when that is the natural parallel to "live shows" or "tours" for film and television.
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
How much is TikTok?
How much is your soul?
More than you can afford if you have any scruples
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
Honestly: our media and film is largely pretty terrible. The arts may be worth a lament.
I think some of it may be demand side.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
When art offers one of the only limited pressure valves for totalitarianism out gets embued with deeper meaning I suppose?