In a concise manner, the TikTok video embedded below from Christopher Claflin pretty much says it all about the mostly mediocre fare available across the over-saturated, subscription-based streaming universe including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Disney+ and even as user-generated content on YouTube (even given its censorship regimen) and elsewhere continues to grow in popularity.
Claflin masterfully explains that the stubbornly-managed streaming platforms and Hollywood studios are losing massive market share, all the while when “they can’t help but double-down on things that are politically charged and socially charged, and this is a huge mistake on their part. And they don’t seem to realize that this is the problem with what they’re doing.”
“As viewers, when we open our favorite streaming apps, we want to escape the absurdity of the real world, not be faced with it again every time we open these streaming platforms. And since these streaming studios insist on shoving more politics, more social issues, and more virtue signaling into the faces of their viewers, viewers are leaving those platforms for more personalized, bite-sized content…,” Clafin opined.
Making matters worse for the entertain-seeking consumer, multiple streaming-service subscriptions are now getting more expensive than rapidly dying traditional cable, Claflin also maintains.
Related story: Is ‘Hollywoke’ the Stale Sequel to Hollywood?
Along similar lines, Gary Buechler, the host and founder of the Nerdrotic channel, cogently describes in this superb monologue the “death spiral of woke Hollywood,” which applies to theater going and online streaming consumption against the backdrop of the writers’ strike.
“Hollywood is in a doom loop, and once again, I think it would be prudent to point out that this is a doom loop created by the producers and writers of Hollywood…there is no way in hell that [they] have even considered the possibility that alienating half of the voting population in this country might not have dire financial consequences…there’s been a feedback loop from the audience, one that you’ve either ignored or vilified us for…,” Buecheler asserted in the nearly 20-minute discourse.
Highlighting the movement of the significant portions of the audience to YouTube, Bucheler declared that “Bottom line: You pissed off a lot of people, you bored a lot of people to tears, you’re losing a generation, and a lot of us just found other things to do.”
He added that “Hollywood got woke and went broke.”
Commenting on Disney stock sinking to almost a nine-year low on Thursday, Breitbart columnist John Nolte wrote that “There’s no question the ongoing catastrophe of the streaming service called Disney+, a service losing billions of dollars annually and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, might have something to do with it. The fact that Disney’s brand is in the toilet might have something to do with it.”
As an aside, it would be fascinating to gain access to data about how many subscribers scroll through a streaming service catalog before giving up entirely or watching yet another inferior show for a few minutes before logging off.
As Nerdotic and others have implied, streaming’s hope for survival likely depends, for better or worse, on consolidation.
Putting an executive in charge of quality control, i.e., someone with real-world experience /sensibility who reads scripts before they are green-lit to see if they are legitimately entertaining and offer a solid story, would be a plus.
Instead of the mandatory girl-power/girl-boss main character in seemingly almost every show or movie, featuring strong yet flawed characters of both genders, would be an upgrade, too.
Parenthetically, from mystery/thrillers to dystopian sci-fi, and almost everything in between, Hollywood has portrayed corporations and corporate execs as the source of villainy in much of its scripted content.
Yet Hollywood, in its generic sense, however, itself is a series of corporations that has aligned itself with leftist woke capitalism that it supposedly loathes, which also includes Big Tech.
As Buechler appropriately noted in the context of the woes of the entertainment industry,. “We no longer have a counter culture or anything that can be the necessary course corrector. Unfortunately, the counter culture that used to be artists in the film industry, the publishing industry, the comic book industry, and the music industry, just to name a few, became firm supporters of the system and cancel culture.”
And as the Hollywood actor character Tommy Wheeler, from the Showtime series Ray Donovan quipped, “Everybody thinks this business is a bunch of radical liberals, but you f–k with the profit margin, they will hang you from a tree like anywhere else.”
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