Hollywood’s Imploding

Our theme for the month of June is “older and wiser.” Writers were asked to write a response to one of their previous pieces. Today, Noah responds to his December 2023 post, “Old Podcasts.”

A few months ago, I published a post called “Old Podcasts,” which can be summed up as “there are people and institutions whose good reputations won’t last, and in a few years, we will collectively wince when we watch/listen to past media (like podcasts) that speak positively about these people and institutions.”

I was right and I was wrong. I was right because there’s been a mass reputation torpedoing. I was wrong because it took a few months rather than a few years.

Yes, I’m talking about the Drake and Kendrick feud, but that’s not the only thing I’m talking about.

However, that is a good place to start. In March, J. Cole inadvertently threw a match on fourteen years of bad blood between Drake and Kendrick Lamar when he referred to Drake, Kendrick Lamar and himself as the “Big Three” of hip-hop in a guest verse on Drake’s song “First Person Shooter.” Kendrick soundly rejected that notion in his song “Like That,” Drake in turn soundly rejected Kendrick’s sound rejection, and resentment that had allegedly been building between the two since the early 2010s boiled over. The two fired off a series of diss tracks at one another; Drake had to delete one of them due to Tupac’s estate suing him for using an AI likeness of Tupac’s voice; Kendrick accused Drake of being a pedophile and a deadbeat father; Drake accused Kendrick of being a wife-beater and mocked alleged sexual abuse in Lamar’s past. A bunch of other artists dogpiled on Drake, including Rick Ross, Metro Boomin, A$AP Rocky and Kanye West. And then Drake recorded a cover of the Plain White Ts’ “Hey There Delilah” with a put-on Patois accent titled “Wah Gwan Delilah.”

That last bit isn’t terribly relevant, but I needed to see that sentence typed out. We are living in a strange timeline.

But that’s the fun part of Hollywood collapsing in on itself. Hollywood’s implosion has an ugly side too.

People dunking on celebrities for being out-of-touch elites trying to seem like normal Joes not living in a wealth-padded bubble is nothing new. (See: the celebrity “Imagine” medley in the early days of quarantine.) But then you throw in an ethnic conflict that the whole world has its eyes on, and working class society’s collective glare of disgust towards the rich and oblivious  becomes that much more withering. That’s what happened this year.

The Met Gala is always a place where celebrities act as living mannequins for the top fashion brands’ most expensive pieces. This year, it had the rotten luck of happening on the same day that Israeli forces seized the Rafah Crossing, the place where Egypt borders Palestine and where much of the humanitarian aid for Palestinians enters Palestinian territory. The images of Camila Cabello carrying a metal flower frozen in a block of ice (?) inadvertently juxtaposed with images of a wave of fresh violence from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But many people’s breaking point came not from a singer or an actor, but an influencer.  TikToker Haley Baylee wore a Marie Antoinette-inspired dress to the Gala and recorded a TikTok where she lip-synced Antoinette’s famed line dismissing the plights of her starving subjects, ”Let them eat cake.” A combination of Baylee’s tone-deaf comment, the opulence of the Met Gala versus the images of carnage at the Rafah Crossing, and the silence and/or passive support for Israel throughout Hollywood  hit a nerve for a lot of people. From this frayed nerve sprang the so-called “Celebrity Block Party,” blocking on social media celebrities who attended Met Gala, are pro-Israel, have been silent on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or all of the above, with the intention of hitting said celebrities right in the ad revenue.

But it’s not only the individuals of Hollywood that are in a downward spiral. The institutions of Hollywood aren’t doing too hot either.

Much ink and… storage space? has been spilled about how movie theaters are in decline. With prices rising, movie theaters still not fully recovered from COVID-19 shutdowns, multiple documented cases of moviegoers no longer knowing how to act, and streaming allowing people to see all kinds of movies without leaving their living room, several movies that a few years ago would have been a license to print money—the DCEU finale The Flash, the MCU’s The Marvels, a fifth Indiana Jones installment, and Disney’s latest animated outing Wish—all bombed at the box office, with more likely to follow in 2024’s summer blockbuster season.

Ironically, despite streaming having snatched up a lot of movie theaters’ revenue, the streaming industry is also no longer what it was. A January article from The Wall Street Journal found that twenty-five percent  of US streaming service users have ended three or more subscriptions since 2022. And there’s a consensus as to why: because streaming has lost the plot.

In the early 2010s, when Netflix and Hulu first became major players in television, their appeal was that you could “cut the cord.” Who needed to pay hundreds of dollars a year to Comcast or AT&T when you could watch all kinds of shows and movies on your own time for $9.99/month? A decade later, the field isn’t quite so clear, and the bevy of streaming services has essentially created a second cable, with many streaming services explicitly created as a hub for a certain channel or studio’s backlog. You know, like a TV channel! Peacock for NBC, Max for HBO & Warner Bros. productions, Disney+ for Disney and Pixar, Paramount+ for Paramount properties… the list goes on.

And maybe streaming services wouldn’t be in decline if they maintained the small price tag that first made them so alluring, but they haven’t! In transparent displays of corporate greed, streaming services and the miserly execs running them have tossed aside the features that made their services appealing in the name of the bottom line. Amazon Prime, whose main appeal was its ad-free viewing, implemented a tier system that made ad-free viewing cost extra earlier this year. Netflix, a company that once made joking tweets about sharing passwords, revoked the ability to do so last year. During the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strike last summer, Disney CEO Bob Iger made comments about letting striking Hollywood workers go broke before he’d consider striking a deal with the unions. David Zaslav, who became the CEO of Warner Brothers in 2022, made a horrible first impression by pulling much of [HBO] Max’s exclusive animated lineup and canceling several complete and near-complete movie productions, all in the name of tax write-offs for Warner Brothers.

All this to say: Hollywood, on all kinds of levels, isn’t doing too hot. Call it karma or the consequences of multiple dumb decisions crashing down all at once, but definitely call it multiple facets of Hollywood showing their butts.

But maybe this is a phoenix moment. Maybe from the ashes of MJR and the mountain of canceled Netflix originals, a new, better Hollywood will rise.

Or maybe a decade from now, we’ll all be sitting around saying, “Man, you remember streaming? Wasn’t that wacky? You think Drake’s gonna get R. Kelly’d?”

You be the judge.