On the menu today: The Hollywood strikes generated a lot of headlines when they began and then . . . for most of the rest of the country, life moved on. There are some contradictory reports about whether the writers and actors are near a deal, and the industry is rapidly approaching a deadline to salvage the film-production schedule for next year. This comes as Hollywood’s usually most lucrative studio, Disney, faces the prospect of going 0-for-4 with its big-budget blockbusters this year. And as the ongoing strikes in America start to pile up, it seems fair to wonder how much of this labor strife is a consequence of the self-described “most pro-union president in American history.” If workers feel underpaid, one contributing factor is the horrible runaway inflation that gripped the country shortly after Biden took office. Finally, for everyone who has spent their lifetime raging against the U.S. federal government’s Board of Tea Experts, victory is at hand.
Hey, Remember Hollywood? Whatever Happened to That?
The state of the ongoing Hollywood strikes depends upon whom you ask.
Earlier this week, CNBC’s David Faber reported, “Writers and producers are near an agreement to end the Writers Guild of America strike after meeting face-to-face on Wednesday.” The two sides negotiated for ten hours Thursday, and are scheduled to meet again today.
But the Los Angeles Times reported late last night, “People close to the negotiations described the tone of Wednesday’s bargaining as positive, but that reports of the two sides being close to a deal were off base.”
The writers’ strike has been going on since May. According to the Times, the two sides are starting to feel the pressure, with the deadline approaching to keep next year’s production schedule from being wrecked in addition to the latter half of this year’s:
Sources said the studio chiefs and the WGA negotiators are motivated to do a deal. If the strike drags on much longer, studios’ TV and film schedules will be further disrupted, resulting in additional financial pain for the companies. Workers, including below-the-line crew, are suffering from months of going without a paycheck.
Many of the studios are eager to get an agreement hammered out by early October to salvage their 2024 film slates, which would require them to be back in production soon. They’re also hoping to salvage what they can from the 2023-24 television season. In the absence of new scripted original shows, the TV networks have filled out their fall schedules with reality series, sports and reruns.
I use “Hollywood strikes” as shorthand, but this isn’t just a southern California story. The fastest-growing film industry in the country is in Georgia. To the extent Marvel’s Wakanda exists, it’s a bunch of filming locations in Georgia. The infamous Hawkins National Lab from Stranger Things is on the campus of Emory University — sadly, scheduled to be demolished. Sizable television- and movie-filming industries have developed in New Mexico and Louisiana as well.
One estimate calculates that the strike has so far effectively cost the country $5 billion in lost economic production; that’s not just businesses involved in the film industry but “restaurants, catering companies, trucking agencies, and dry cleaning businesses, among many others.”
To the extent public opinion matters, polling indicates that half of Americans support the writers and actors striking, while 40 percent describe themselves as neutral on the topic and 9 percent disapprove. (Even if movie and television stars weren’t famous and glamorous, Hollywood studio executives would not be particularly sympathetic figures.) Still, support for the striking creative class may well be a mile wide and an inch deep:
When the questions move beyond approval toward potential actions favoring the strike, the support gets considerably softer.
One-third would consider boycotting TV shows, while even more (41 percent) would not. Slightly fewer (27 percent) said they would consider canceling streaming services, while 44 percent said they would not. Three in 10 Americans also said they would consider boycotting movie theaters, while 34 percent would not. The unions have yet to ask for any of these moves from consumers, though have said they might if the standoffs last long enough.
I would note that Hollywood now lives in a media environment where viewers have a near-endless supply of new “content.” The world is full of podcasts, YouTube and other social-media videos, every kind of imaginable sports, reality-television shows, etc. If one of the unspoken questions posed during the strike was whether the American people could entertain themselves once movie and television production suddenly stopped, the answer is a resounding yes.
If, as I lament, a lot of political figures and elected officials choose to behave like reality-show stars, you have to wonder if the world of politics has become another form of entertainment, and thus another de facto form of competition for Hollywood.
As for the notion that Americans might boycott movie theaters in support of the striking writers and actors . . . other than Barbie and Oppenheimer, some might argue Americans were already boycotting movie theaters, and that was one of the biggest problems facing Hollywood. Americans fell out of the habit of going to the movies during the pandemic. Gallup found that from 2001 to 2007, 32 percent of Americans said they’d seen no movies in the theater in the past year, 39 percent said they’d seen one to five movies in the theater, and 29 percent said they’d seen five or more. In 2021 — the first year after the pandemic — 61 percent of Americans said they hadn’t seen a movie in a theater in the past year, 31 percent said they had seen one to five movies, and just 9 percent said they’d seen five or more.
This summer saw one big brand-name blockbuster after another dramatically underperform. One threshold for a blockbuster was making $1 billion worldwide; the Star Wars and Marvel movies regularly hit $500 million domestically. Only Barbie and Super Mario Brothers have surpassed $500 million at the domestic box office so far this year; Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse ranks third at $381 million.
A slew of really big-name movies, with big stars and beloved familiar characters, couldn’t even hit half of that $500 million threshold — and that’s with higher ticket prices, thanks in part to inflation. The latest Ant-Man movie reached $214 million; Indiana Jones reached $174 million; Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One reached $172 million; Transformers: Rise of the Beasts could only change into $157 million; Pixar’s Elemental failed to catch fire at $154 million; Fast X sputtered to $145 million; The Flash staggered to $108 million; and in the largest signal that the public is losing interest in superhero stories, Blue Beetle crawled to $67 million.
Why are these movies flopping? A lot of people will tell you it’s because the films are “woke,” and I don’t doubt that vibes of preachiness, political correctness, lecturing, hectoring, and general insufferable smugness are a factor.
But I also wonder if the expense of making and marketing these blockbusters has gotten so high, they don’t make much economic sense anymore. These movies have become like a baseball player who must hit a home run every time he’s at the plate to justify his lucrative contract.
Disney reported that it spent nearly $1 billion on four major projects this year — Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Little Mermaid, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and the Disney Plus limited television series Secret Invasion. No offense to anyone who enjoyed any of those, but all of them were critical and commercial flops, significantly less popular and less watched than previous films and series featuring these characters. (For what it’s worth, I thought Dial of Destiny was just barely adequate.) If you think about it, it’s hard to believe that Disney could go 0-for-4 with four different concepts with four different popular characters in different genres, with different directors, screenwriters, etc.
And vast sums of those expenses do not necessarily end up on the screen. There were reports that the marketing and advertising costs of Dial of Destiny ranged between $100 to $200 million. Now, I don’t work in the film industry, but if there was ever a product that sold itself, wasn’t it an Indiana Jones film? A few years ago, when Solo failed to make a profit, there were reports that Disney had spent $150 million on marketing that tale of the young Han Solo. It’s a Star Wars film! About Han Solo! Every Generation X dad who played with the action figures is going to show up with his kids! How many billboards and commercials do you need for a movie like that?
Finally, President Biden likes to boast he’s the most pro-union president in American history. Whether Biden wanted this or not, this means he’s also becoming the most pro-strike president in American history. When the man behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office keeps bragging that he has your back, you probably feel like you’ve got extra leverage in a dispute. The result is that the country is not only experiencing a Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strike, it is experiencing the biggest strike by the United Auto Workers in years, and smaller strikes by various unions of hotel workers and nurses. There are rumbles of regional strikes by the Service Employees International Union and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants.
And while workers believe they are underpaid and underappreciated for a variety of reasons, one big factor is that their wages aren’t keeping up with the inflation rate. “Since President Biden took office, prices have increased cumulatively by 17.4 percent, while hourly wages have increased only 13 percent.” Since Biden took office, real disposable income is down 8.3 percent, credit-card debt is up 35 percent, and monthly savings are down 81 percent.
Unions are striking, knowing the president has their back, in response to economic conditions shaped by the early policy decisions of “the most pro-union president in American history.”
ADDENDUM: Believe it or not, a federal agency — well, technically a standing advisory committee — is actually shutting down for good. Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, notes that the U.S. federal government’s Board of Tea Experts — no, that is not made up or from The Weed Agency — is formally ceasing to exist, in response to the Federal Tea Tasters Repeal Act of 1996. The board “was responsible for making recommendations to the Secretary of the Treasury to fix and establish uniform standards of purity, quality, and fitness for consumption of all kinds of teas imported into the United States.”
Young notes the closure “only took 27 years!”
Thanks to @tomabella for calling my attention to this.