HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Hollywood’s big boom has gone bust.

For over a decade, business was booming in Hollywood, with studios battling to catch up to new companies like Netflix and Hulu. But the good times ground to a halt in May 2023, when Hollywood’s writers went on strike.

The strikes lasted multiple months and marked the first time since the 1960s that both writers and actors joined forces – effectively shutting down Hollywood production. But rather than roaring back, in the one year since the strikes ended, production has fizzled.

Projects have been cancelled and production was cut across the city as jobs have dried up, with layoffs at many studios – most recently at Paramount. It had a second round of layoffs this week, as the storied movie company moves to cut 15% of its workforce ahead of a merger with the production company Skydance.

Unemployment in film and TV in the United States was at 12.5% in August, but many think those numbers are actually much higher, because many film workers either do not file for unemployment benefits because they’re not eligible or they’ve exhausted those benefits after months of not working.

As a whole, the number of US productions during the second quarter of 2024 was down about 40% compared to the same period in 2022. Globally, there was a 20% decline over that period, according to ProdPro, which tracks TV and film productions.

That means fewer new movies and binge-worthy shows for us.

But experts say the streaming boom wasn’t sustainable. And studios are trying to figure out how to be profitable in a new world when people don’t pay for cable TV funded by commercials.

“The air has come out of the content bubble,” says Matthew Belloni, the founder of Puck News, which covers the entertainment industry. “Crisis is a good word. I try not to be alarmist, but crisis is what people are feeling.”

As Rob Long in the July/August issue of Commentary: Streaming and Screaming.

I’ve heard the same calculation from writers, directors, even people in talent management: cutbacks, tight belts, more people fighting over fewer opportunities, all signals to get out of the business while there’s still some money in the bank to start over, in some other place, in some other business.

“The interesting thing about battlefield medicine,” a U.S. Army medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan told me recently, “is that the screaming is always the loudest well after the limb has been removed.”

That makes sense, of course. People tend to make the most noise when it’s too late—when the amputation is complete, when the parent is dead and buried, when the cultural change has taken root, when the next generation has taken over, when you wrote an unspecified number of Mr. Ed’s but haven’t had a meeting in years.

The screaming is always the loudest, in other words, when all hope is lost and whatever you’re screaming about is already permanent.

Which brings us to the entertainment industry in the summer of 2024, where the screaming is just getting started.

I’d do the usual “learn to code” jokes here, but a Hollywood that’s more interested in coding streaming platforms rather than making watchable product is exactly how they’ve wound up in their current predicament. (And as everyone warned them in 2023, maybe going on strike shortly after emerging from a pandemic was not a wise move by an industry that should have been doing everything it could to get butts back into movie theater seats.)