Stream Of Unconsciousness

In a post-COVID world, there's little place for movie theaters, and increasingly, for entire movie studios, as NYT columnist Ben Smith opines on the death of Warner Bros.

For decades, the best thing about being a Hollywood executive, really, was how you got fired. Studio executives would be gradually, gently, even lovingly, nudged aside, given months to shape their own narratives and find new work, or even promoted. When Amy Pascal was pushed out of Sony Pictures in 2015, she got an exit package and production deal worth a reported $40 million. 

That, of course, was before streaming services arrived, upending everything with a ruthless logic and coldhearted efficiency. 

That was never more clear than on Aug. 7, when WarnerMedia abruptly eliminated the jobs of hundreds of employees, emptying the executive suite at the once-great studio that built Hollywood, and is now the subsidiary of AT&T. In a series of brisk video calls, executives who imagined they were studio eminences were reminded that they work — or used to work — at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt, learned that he’d been fired the morning of the day the news broke, two people he spoke to told me. Jeffrey Schlesinger, a 37-year company veteran who ran the lucrative international licensing business, complained to friends that he had less than an hour’s notice, two other people told me. 

“We’re in the brutal final scenes of Hollywood as people here knew it, as streaming investment and infrastructure take precedence,” said Janice Min, the former Hollywood Reporter co-president who did a brief stretch as an executive at the streaming platform Quibi. “Politesse and production deal kiss-offs for those at the top, and, more importantly, the financial fire hose to float a bureaucracy, seem to be disappearing. It’s like a club, already shut down by the pandemic, running out of dues to feed all its members.” 

The drama at Warner marked a turning point, in part because of its huge size and the high profile of the iconic companies under its umbrella: Warner Brothers, HBO and CNN among them. And it comes as Hollywood power is conspicuously absent from the national conversation. Washington is consumed by TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that’s the most successful new content platform in the world. TikTok has succeeded as Quibi — Hollywood’s premium alternative to user-generated content — struggles to find an audience. The California politician just nominated for the vice presidency comes from San Francisco, and doesn’t particularly advertise her Hollywood ties (though she was all over Hollywood insiders’ Instagram last week). 

The corporate shifts at WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal in recent days signal that the technological shift you’ve been reading about for years is finally taking concrete form, accelerated by the pandemic. The new leaders of the industry want to talk about digital products and subscription marketing. The most interesting profiles of entertainment executives are, literally, obituaries, notably the catalog of victories and vices that marked the career of Viacom’s founder, Sumner Redstone. 

(Like much of his industry, Mr. Redstone, who died last week at age 97, held on far longer than anyone expected. Former Viacom employees recalled that it had been more than six years since, the then- chief executive, Philippe Dauman, asked his aides to draft a stirring eulogy for Mr. Redstone, who was 90 at the time, and to create a website in his memory. But Mr. Dauman was fired four years ago, there are no plans for him to deliver a eulogy and the website remains on some forgotten digital shelf.) 

Much of what’s happening now in Hollywood, too, has that feeling of a death so long anticipated that you half assumed you’d just missed the funeral. At WarnerMedia, the executives’ firings came after the company badly botched the introduction of a streaming service whose name — HBO Go, HBO Now, or HBO Max — nobody could figure out. The service has primarily distinguished itself so far by its energetic and unsuccessful attempts to spin about 4 million people who have actually used the service into a number north of 30 million.

Disney Plus is trying to sell the live action Mulan remake for $29, the price of an adult movie ticket and two kids tickets and no popcorn.

A year from now most movie theaters in the US will be out of business, but they were headed for the graveyard ever since 9/11 and the Aurora shooting made them soft targets in the back of everyone's minds. All COVID did was speed up the desiccation process.