Agreed.
I miss good films like Jurassic Park or Driving Miss Daisy or Platoon or even the National Lampoon movies.

I miss going to a movie or watching a new TV show where I did not get a indirect or even a direct moral lecture on lefty values.

I miss movies that were not afraid to offend and were actually funny.

I am sick to GOD of retread sequels that get me to a point that I actually dislike the original film.

I miss good storytelling by interesting human beings.

For me, this is the type of article that justifies a subscription to Unherd. Like many people, I’ve watched the gradual decay of the creative industries, especially the movie industry, for years. I never fully understood why this was happening. Every now and then, someone would say, “Ah, yes, it’s Big Tech’s fault” but I wasn’t sure why. Now I think I understand.
Essentially, one way or another, movies, publishing, the music business are all subsidiaries of Tech, and Tech’s main interest is driving consumers of these products toward its most profitable businesses, not trying to create great tv, movies, etc. It’s remarkable to think companies like Amazon can sustain huge annual losses on politicized movies/tv few people want to watch until you look at the vast profits of these companies. Apple, for example, has approximately 50 billion dollars of cash and equivalents on hand, and that’s without considering its almost infinite line of credit with the banks.
Like the author, I have no idea how the creative industries will once again produce content people want. I wonder if there’s an opening in the market for a new, non-woke movie company? Perhaps the author would write an article about that possibility.

The public gets what the public deserves…. I saw Barbie last night, and it seemed I was the only member of the audience who thought it was like sitting through a two hour episode of Love Island scripted by fourteen year olds who had been given the theme “The Patriarchy” for their homework.
It would have been tiresomely outdated even if it had been released 20 years ago, but the feeble stereotypes, confused narrative and cloying sentimentality made me wonder if we were already seeing films written and directed by AI.

I agree with the overall sentiment of American popular culture stagnation, but I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes at this article. First and foremost, why the diatribe against those not falling over themselves to shout from the rooftops about the godlike musical prowess of Taylor Swift? What was that? It read like an obsessed fan who couldn’t pass up the opportunity to lash out at all the Swift “haters” he’s encountered on the Internet over the years now that he has this tiny soapbox. Good grief. No one takes seriously the argument that she’s not talented. Swift has been the darling of music critics for over a decade.

The author also seems to have a pretty poor understanding of what a monopoly is. These companies are monopolies only in the Lina Khan sense. Yes the digital revolution has upended music, TV, movies, the star system but that has also happened before. It will happen again. This strike will only accelerate what’s already happening. That’s exactly what happened the last time the WGA went on strike.

Well written but one sided. The destructive aspects are exactly as described but missing are the positive developments flowing from the same tech changes e.g. Netflix and the other streamers have created a new long form format which has elevated the episodic series into something which rivals novels; thousands of songs on Spotify instead of a few CDs or LPs; podcasts; the proliferation of essays from a wide range of perspectives on Substack, UnHerd and similar sites; the use of WhatsApp groups to bring together victims of specific diseases or corporate malefactors, etc, etc. 

Drawing up a balance sheet is difficult. There are clear losses e.g. the near elimination of local journalism or lower incomes for non-star musicians but also many gains.  

In the long run, I suspect that the most lasting change will be the democratisation of “gatekeeping”. Amazon style stars will have more impact than critics. Provided official/tech censorship is prevented this should broaden choice.

Overall, not all change is bad. We are engaged in a white water ride, full of dangers but also of possibilities. We need to be alert – steering away from some rocks – but there is no need for fatalistic despondency.

Great article, somewhat undermined by factual errors: Nolan is British, the Directors guild aren’t on strike, there are five installments of Indiana Jones etc.
But aside from lamenting the demise of the fact-checking sub-editor as another casualty of the economics of digital journalism, I commend you for making the argument so persuasively.

Christopher Nolan is British.

I have a friend who has kept all his old DVDs instead of relying on streaming services. I thought he might be paranoid when he said the big TV and streaming services will begin to censor and alter films and ban things which don’t fit with modern progressive sensibilities. Like so many things, it seemed far-fetched until it started happening.

The devil’s greatest lie was that the customer is king. There’s hardly a clearer indictment of our system of democracy than government failure to prevent – and indeed complicity in – the triumph of monopolies.

This strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) reminds me irresistably of the militancy of the Film Actors Guild (FAG) in “Team America: World Police”. Now that was a film.

There’s an argument that the cultural form of narrative in Europe is The Hero’s Tale – which is basically there and back again, with prizes.
In the USA the cultural form of narrative is the road trip – if you don’t like where you are keep on going.
So if USA big business ends up producing ‘safe entertainment’ it encourages people to move on to other things. There are plenty of digital alternatives, many of them free or low cost.

It’s a minor thing but isn’t Christopher Nolan a dual US/UK national. I enjoyed Oppenheimer, not least because there was minimal shoehorning of fashionable preoccupations into the piece.

Isn’t the irony here that the writers strike believes they are providing great creative ideas/ stories and thus demand a better working wage but the reality is that they are actually doing a subpar job and should not receive more.
If they really were doing such a great job, I would expect the audience to share in their pain, but it doesn’t seem like anyone cares as we mindlessly scroll through our free media devices in our hands.

Try Korean drama. Superior in every way to that made in the west.

The devil is in the details. No one is forced to buy Apple products. Android is a legitimate competitor. No one is forced to search on Google. There is still Bing and Yahoo. So trying to write rational anti monopoly legislation is very difficult. There is the added problem that China has no problem with monopolies and actually funds state backed companies that compete with American companies that get no govenment support.

Hollywood has been here before:

https://archive.org/details/easyridersraging00bisk/mode/1up?view=theater

This is, David, an exceptionally accurate analysis of the entertainment world as we know it.
You have identified the problem, precisely:
“The strategy of overspending and then dumping new content into the marketplace made it hard for even the most original creators to stand out from the surrounding oceans of sludge.”
As evidence of the profound truth that your analysis presents, I submit, herewith: two lost-in-the-shuffle ancient record albums and four historical fiction novels.
Please excuse me, but having been a writer of songs, record albums, cd’s, four novels and 1200 blogposts, I was absolutely amazed while reading your assessment, above.
If your message happens to grab the attention of any music-promoters or any publishers, perhaps they will do a search for these new candidates:
Music: “Something for Everyone” 1978. “Revelation 5:9” 1979.
Historical fiction novels: Glass half-Full (2007), Glass Chimera (2008), Smoke (2011) King of Soul (2017)
These four novels are not mindless, superfluous fluff for caressing dull minds, but rather. . . (respectively, in order): Glass half-Full: trouble in Washington DC that is perpetrated by a group of neo-nazi meth-cookers in the early 2000’s.
Glass Chimera: buried treasure and genetic engineering in New Orleans, USA.
Smoke: what was happening in Europe in 1937, beginning in London, precisely on May 12, 1937, the Coronation day of King George VI, Charles’ grandfather.
King of Soul: What happened to the USA during the Vietnam war, told from a Southern perspective.
These are all stories and songs that inform and educate curious minds, rather than anaesthetizing them with predictable drivel. I hope you will view them as examples that support your thesis above, rather than being merely the self-obsessed drivel of this writer, whom Paul McCartney once identified as the “Paperback Writer,” based on (haha!) “a novel by a man named Lear.”,
And, as Paul sang it: “and I need a job so I wanna be a paperback writer”! but Hollywood’s not hiring, nor is New York. How about London?

Never Watch The Sequel

“Cashing big checks from Hollywood’s would-be monopolists may have helped writers, directors and actors to pay for their swimming pools, but they also helped to kill the golden goose.” Cashing checks? How does one cash a check? UNHERD is a British publication. The word is cheque.

The ultimate cause of all this was the laissez-faire neo-liberal capitalism ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan and the only thing that would have prevented the decline of newspapers and movie studios would have been robust government regulation and anti-trust enforcement to protect these industries and their workers by maintaining competition. I know of no one on the right calling for a return to the days of regulated capitalism and strong unions. The irony is that conservatives can now see the problem, which was of their own making, but they can’t stomach the solution.