HOLLYWOOD ONLY HAS ITSELF TO BLAME FOR INDUSTRY WOES

National Review

 

Hollywood Only Has Itself to Blame for Industry Woes

By Jim Geraghty

December 9, 2025 10:20 AM

 

On the menu today: Parts of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) are for sale, including the film-studio portion and HBO’s properties. On Friday, the streaming giant Netflix announced a plan to purchase WBD and HBO, sending shockwaves through Hollywood and prompting predictions that the end of movie theaters is rapidly approaching. Now the deal is up in the air, as Paramount Skydance announced that it intends to make a hostile takeover and convince the WBD shareholders to vote to sell to them. On one path, WBD and HBO end up with a streaming service; on the other path, even greater consolidation of big-name Hollywood studios. Hollywood’s creative class fears the future. But if they collectively don’t like the position they’re in, they and the studio heads have no one to blame but themselves.

 

An Airing of the Grievances with Hollywood

 

At the risk of sounding like an old man, I can recall that, when I was a teenager in the early 1990s, the price of a movie ticket for an evening show was seven dollars. Even when the minimum wage was $4.25 per hour or $5.05 per hour — it increased in 1992 in New Jersey — I don’t remember finding it hard to scrape together seven bucks when I wanted to see a movie.

 

When I was a young twentysomething in the late 1990s in Washington, D.C., I remember a ticket costing eight or nine bucks. Apparently, the average price nationally for a ticket to the movies back then was $4.69; adjusted for inflation, that price would be $9.43 today.

 

Today, here in Authenticity Woods, Va., the nearest movie theater is a nice one, with reclining seats, inclined rows, and much better food options. I checked, and the current price for a ticket to an evening show is $17, plus a fee of a bit more than $2 if I want to reserve tickets online. That’s almost $20 a head, and that doesn’t include popcorn or soda.

 

I’ve seen the argument that, adjusted for inflation, movie ticket prices haven’t increased that much, although it still increased from around eight bucks in the early 1990s to about ten bucks in 2022. Even if these numbers are accurate — and keep in mind, inflation took off like a rocket in 2022, and I’m not sure the chart supplied by that link takes that into account — I don’t think Hollywood fully recognizes how movie-ticket pricing influences moviegoers’ habits.

 

When a movie cost me eight or nine bucks, I watched a lot of schlocky movies, sometimes on a weeknight after a bad day at work. Deep Rising comes to mind. When a movie doesn’t cost that much, you’re willing to roll the dice on a movie that might not be so great. Discussing this with my wife, she reminded me of how often we would go to the movies in sweltering Washington, D.C. summer heat, because sitting in powerful air conditioning for a few hours was a nice bonus alongside the movie. And when I saw Memento in 2000, I came home, told my soon-to-be-wife how amazing it was, convinced her to go watch it with me, and I watched it a second time in one day.

 

But now, when going to a movie in the theater costs nearly twenty bucks a head, I’m much less likely to go if I’m not sure I’m going to like the movie. The higher the ticket price, the less likely I am to take a gamble on a movie that might not be all that enjoyable.

 

Contrast that with staying home and watching a movie on Netflix. There’s no drive or parking fees. There’s no ticket price. The movie starts when I want it to start, and I can hit pause to get a snack or go for a bathroom break. The only teenagers in the audience are the ones I created. I don’t have to watch 20 minutes of ads or trailers for other movies. And if I decide I don’t like the movie, I just hit stop and find something else. And all I paid was my subscription fee.

 

Yes, many of today’s movie theaters are much nicer than the days of non-stadium seating, sticky floors, and much more limited food options. But if all those improved amenities mean a ticket costs closer to 20 bucks than ten bucks, fewer people are going to come through the doors. I am reminded of my 2023 examination of Disney prices, laying out how going to a Disney theme park is significantly more expensive now than it was in past decades, even when you adjust for inflation. A business chooses to pursue a higher-end clientele that is willing to pay higher prices, and then after a few years, it wonders why its client base is so much smaller. Well, buddy, part of the problem is you priced out a significant chunk of your potential customer base!

 

But those are the problems with the theater experience itself. There’s no getting around the facts of the problems of what’s being projected onto the screen.

 

Chalk it up to wokeness, or competition from streaming services, or a new class of studio managers, but Hollywood virtually abandoned entire genres.

 

It’s not just your imagination; Hollywood makes significantly fewer comedies than it used to. In an industry always looking to make a quick buck, this is spectacularly odd; one of the great ironies is that comedies usually aren’t that expensive to make. They usually don’t require lots of special effects, or filming in far-off locations, or complicated stunts. (Can we all agree that Office Space is one of the all-time greats? It cost $10 million to make in 1999, which is just under $20 million in today’s dollars.)

 

And yet, Hollywood virtually discarded making movies that tried to make people laugh. It’s hard not to suspect that political correctness and the risk of crossing the woke outrage mobs made comedies a much more dangerous bet for studios.

 

The number of romantic comedies released by Hollywood each year dropped like a stone. Perhaps certain swaths of Hollywood’s creative class don’t want to tell stories that are “heteronormative.” Perhaps #MeToo made screenwriters, directors, and actors squeamish about sex scenes or jokes about sex. Or perhaps in a profession where everyone wants to think of themselves as feminist and empowering women, a story where true love conquers all and the female protagonist finds happiness in the loving arms of a man feels too “patriarchal.”

 

(Have you noticed that Hallmark’s Christmas movies have a dedicated fan base? They are definitely not my taste*, but clearly there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of women who love these kinds of stories, clichés and all. So why has no studio tried to release a Hallmark-style Christmas movie in theaters? I bet quite a few women would drag their husbands to the theater if they had the option.)

 

Part of the disappearance of comedies and romantic comedies reflects the fact that Hollywood makes significantly fewer mid-range-budget films. You can still find small independent films made for $15 million or less, and big-budget blockbusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but all those films in the middle are fewer and further between. A strong argument can be made that Hollywood grew so obsessed with making money in overseas markets that it lost interest in catering to American audiences:

 

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[Matt] Damon believes the ability to penetrate international markets explains why studios prioritize superhero blockbusters. The number of Chinese movie screens has grown from just under 5,000 in 2009 to over 82,000 by 2021. Superhero movies are easily translatable across cultures because of their striking visuals and simplistic plots. Foreign countries might not show interest in a Coen Brothers portrayal of the 1960’s folk music scene or an Adam McKay biopic of a former vice president. The existence of international markets like China, India, South Korea, and Mexico, combined with the ancillary revenue made from merchandising, explains why comic book franchises and action/adventure/fantasy remakes have taken over Hollywood.

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Our old friend Kyle Smith, now the film critic for the Wall Street Journal, fights a constant battle to remind people that there are a lot of options at the multiplex beyond superhero movies. Maybe those non-superhero movies are not advertised as well as they used to be, or they aren’t generating buzz and enthusiastic recommendations the way they used to, but they’re out there.

 

Speaking of superhero blockbusters, we should take a moment to stare in amazement at how Disney has managed to take not one but two of the all-time most popular franchises, a pair of toy- and merchandise-selling golden geese, and run both of them into the ground. There was a time not that long ago — 2019, when Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame was released — when it looked like the Marvel superhero movies and the Star Wars films would make billions, year after year, for the foreseeable future.

 

Chalk it up to the “M-She-U,” or the retirement of popular characters and actors, or the rapid proliferation of Marvel shows on Disney Plus, but the magic is gone; there’s nowhere near the sense of a Marvel movie being a must-see as there was before the Covid-19 interruption.

 

Your mileage may vary, but I actually feel like Marvel has enjoyed a comeback in quality this year with Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. By the standards of other movies, they did okay; Thunderbolts is the 12th highest-grossing movie of 2025 with $190 million in the domestic box office, and Fantastic Four ranks 7th at $274 million. But by the standards of previous Marvel movies, they’re flops.

 

Star Wars hasn’t released a movie in theaters since before the pandemic. In May, we will get The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring characters from a Disney Plus television show that was beloved by fans for about two seasons, then bizarrely careened off the rails in its third. Again, your mileage may vary, but the trailer for the forthcoming movie looks astonishingly “meh” for a Star Wars movie.

 

Finally, this complaint is the most nebulous, but I feel like the entire storytelling culture of Hollywood’s creative class is broken. This tweet from Riley Hale spoke to me:

 

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Hollywood removed the hero’s journey, masculinity, redemption, sacrifice, and beauty standards in 2025, then wondered why global box office fell 18 percent and no film cracked $1 billion. . . . The same industry that spent a decade lecturing audiences on “problematic” tropes now releases 400 movies a year that nobody wants to watch. They didn’t just kill the blockbuster. They sterilized the entire reason humans ever told stories in the first place.

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I notice that Amazon’s Reacher was one of the biggest streaming hits of the year, and in a lot of ways, it’s an “old-fashioned” show. A big burly hero, played with a lot of charm by Alan Ritchson, gets ensnared in a mystery and constantly runs into thugs and villains who look at the 6’3”, 240-pound former military police investigator Jack Reacher and think, “Oh yeah, I can take this guy in a fistfight.” As you can imagine, it almost never goes well for them.

 

So, yes, Hollywood and the movie business have a lot of problems. But one of the biggest and most glaring ones is that they stopped making movies that people enjoy watching.

 

*Netflix’s Champagne Problems starring Minka Kelly features one of the meanest stereotypes of a German ever depicted on screen, with the character delivering a full monologue about how Die Hard is a Christmas tragedy and Hans Gruber is a misunderstood hero. The movie is fine, but that character is hilarious.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, a look at what the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) says about China. Alas, what this administration says it intends to do and what this administration does are often no more than distant cousins, particularly when it comes to the Chinese government. The NSS sounds tough . . . but on issue after issue, the Trump administration is making concessions to Beijing, all in exchange for Xi Jinping buying some American soybeans.