“Survive Until 2025” is over. What next for Hollywood?

“Survive until 2025” was the mantra in post-labor strike Hollywood.  With studios releasing nearly 30% fewer movies today than in 2019, and TV writing jobs down 42% since 2023, how much longer do we have to wait?

If you’re a listener of the excellent The Town podcast hosted by Matt Belloni, former editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter and Hollywood insider, then you’ve heard the post-strike mantra ad nauseam.  To be fair, they treated it as symbolic while regularly address the underlying issues behind it.

To recap:

• The Writers Guild of America (WGA) struck from May 2 to September 27, 2023.

• SAG-AFTRA struck in solidarity and ran from July 14 to November 9, 2023.

• Not to be forgotten, IATSE, which handles the bulk of the below the line jobs on film and TV productions, did not strike and instead reached a 3 year agreement in June 2024 to prevent any further misery.

A common consensus after the SAG-AFTRA agreement was that after 6 months of labor uncertainty, productions would restart after the holidays and ramp up by late summer/early fall 2024.  That did not happen. 

The LA Times wrote about the struggles of several freelance crew members in May 2024 and did a follow up piece at the end of the year.  Great read: LA Times article.

Last month, The Hollywood Reporter obtained an email sent to WGA members showing “there were 1,819 television writing jobs last season, a 42 percent decline from the 2022-23 season. Last season’s numbers are far fewer than even the COVID season of 2019-20, which employed 2,722 writers.  Cord-cutters and corporate greed are to blame, the WGA says.”

On the film side, there were 193 WGA-covered films released in 2019 and 197 in 2024.  So that number has mostly remained stable.  But considering there are over 25,000 members of WGA, less than 10% had a job last year, if the numbers bear out.  (WGA Writer Employment Snapshot)

Beyond writers, there are about 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, including “actors, stunt perfomers, broadcast journalists and other media professionals” (https://www.sagaftra.org/about).  IATSE—“the union behind entertainment”—represents over 170,000 workers in the US and Canada.  (https://iatse.net). They make up most of the names in the long scrolling credits at the end of a movie.

Currently, five major film studios commonly referred to as the “Big Five”—Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures—release the bulk of the movies mainstream audiences watch in theaters.  In 2024, 569 movies were released domestically for a box office total of $8.72 billion.  In comparison, 792 movies were released in 2019, just before the pandemic, generating a total of $11.36 billion.  That’s a 28% drop in film output and 23% drop in box office, huge numbers considering the previous arms race of moviemaking and the growth during the “Peak TV” era.

Math was never my strong suit, but with roughly 355,000 union members in film and TV—not counting the thousands of independent filmmakers, freelance crew, actors, vendors and others supported by and supporting the entertainment industry—the pain is widespread.

Highlights of an Industry in Decline

COVID’s Lingering Impact

In 2020, only 460 films were released domestically, down over 40% year over year.   While those numbers have since improved, they remain nearly 30% below pre-pandemic levels. Five years in, it’s unclear whether we’re at a new normal or the recovery is incomplete.

The End of the Streaming Wars

The Big Five studios have retreated from their goal of competing with Netflix, the dominant streaming service, which is now basically a utility for most American households.  Where once the goal was growth, now it is profitability. Amazingly, studios—most notably Disney, have cut their way to earnings success while also raising prices and cracking down on password sharing. But as Matt Belloni and others have noted, this is an unsustainable model.  Even “market-leading Netflix slashed their number of scripted series by more than one-third”.  U.S. News article

The UK’s Rise

The UK has become a major player in global film and TV production, thanks to aggressive tax incentives and credits in addition to world-class production facilities. This has attracted a high volume of projects that once kept the lots full in LA, New York, and Georgia.  Per Senal News, this shift has been primarily driven by the Big Five and major streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple, which accounted for “65% of total UK film production spend” in 2024.

But the news is not all bad.  Stay tuned for my follow up post.

Joe Kim is a former IT pro & film festival founder/director, pursuing opportunities in the film and TV industry.