“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” When Norma Desmond delivered that line in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950, she was mourning her own vanished stardom.
She was also, without knowing it, writing the first line of Hollywood’s own endless self-obituary. For the best part of 80 years, the US motion picture business has been dying, if you were to believe both its advocates and its critics.
The threats change, but the apocalyptic tone doesn’t. In 1948, the US supreme court forced the studios to sell off the cinema chains that had made them vertically integrated giants. Within a few years, television was emptying the stalls. The studios responded by making the screen enormous, in Technicolour, CinemaScope and, briefly, 3D.
By the late 1960s, those same studios were bloated and out of touch, pouring fortunes into leaden roadshow musicals the young had stopped wanting to see, until Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Easy Rider proved that long-haired youth would still go to the pictures.
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The panics kept coming. In 1982, studio lobbyist Jack Valenti told congress: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”
Home video went on to become one of Hollywood’s great revenue streams, until the DVD boom that followed collapsed in turn. In the early 2000s, the industry began mourning the death of the grown-up picture, a lament now old enough to have its own midlife crisis.
Then came the double whammy of the streaming revolution and the pandemic, which persuaded many in the industry that the theatrical habit would never return.
If Hollywood is under threat though, the real Trojan Horse is not AI slop
The newest Cassandra in the chorus relates to artificial intelligence. The actor James Woods was not alone when he told Fox News that “AI is the end of human actors”.
Inside the industry, the perennial quality of these alarms is well understood. Surveying the wreckage in The Hollywood Reporter this spring, under the weary headline “Hollywood Is Dying, But What Else Is New?”, one veteran of the business acknowledged that the Hollywood he joined in the 1980s no longer exists, but pointed to the recurring pattern: the very technologies blamed for each crisis have ended up remaking and reviving the business.
It is far from clear what impact AI is actually having on the making of films, from first treatment to final cut. So far it seems to be seeping into the edges rather than transforming the core. It tidies scripts in development, cleans up shots in post-production, dubs films into different languages and cuts trailers. But it has barely touched the two ends of the chain, the live-action shoot and the cinema screen. The sector most exposed and likely to go first is animation, an entirely digital pipeline where the machines have the clearest run.
But there is one sense in which Hollywood genuinely is dying. It is ceasing to be a physical place where films and TV are made. Soundstages sit half empty, and the old lots are quiet. Los Angeles recorded just 19,694 shoot days in 2025, around a 16 per cent drop from the previous year and the lowest total outside the pandemic year of 2020. The below-the-line workforce that made this an industry town, the grips and gaffers and set builders, has scattered to Georgia, Canada, Ireland, the UK and central Europe, chasing the tax credits Los Angeles was too slow to match.
So two rival stories are running. On one side, the trade press cheers a recovery, with the domestic box office expected to surpass $10 billion this year compared to 2025’s $8.6 billion. On the other, an agent tells The Spectator that streaming has ruined the business, prompting the fire-sales of Paramount and Warner Bros, while Netflix, supposedly the war’s winner, has watched its shares fall about 40 per cent over the year.
There are some signs of life, though. Obsession, a horror movie made for around $750,000, has taken more than $400 million worldwide, suggesting that younger viewers, underwhelmed by creaky old franchises like Star Wars, will return to cinemas to see films that chime with their sensibilities. And the success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey shows that audiences will still turn out for big-budget spectacles.
If Hollywood is under threat though, the real Trojan Horse is not AI slop. It’s the ownership of the shrinking number of studios by Silicon Valley, whose interests are not those of their Californian neighbours to the south. The Ellison family, whose fortune was made with Oracle, has already taken over Paramount and is intent on swallowing Warner Bros too.
The Ellisons have demonstrated their willingness to bend the knee to the Trump administration by making changes to news coverage at Paramount-owned CBS, and the US president has made clear he expects something similar at Warner-owned CNN should the takeover be successful.
None of this necessarily impacts the kinds of films and TV dramas being made. But it can. Amazon-owned MGM dropped Luca Guadagnino’s unflattering film about OpenAI boss Sam Altman while in the middle of a $50 billion deal with that same company. Studios may look at that example and draw the obvious conclusion that certain types of story are best avoided.
It hardly seems coincidental that The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming sequel to The Social Network, the unflattering 2010 portrait of the Facebook founder and now Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, is being made by the Japanese-owned Sony, one of the last big studios still outside the orbit of American tech.
