Hollywood is dead, according to Justine Bateman. Here’s what comes next

Hollywood is dead.

In October of 2024, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) posted this on social media: “Hollywood, meet your new A-List.” There were no actors in the accompanying photo. Featured instead were TikTokers and Instagram “influencers” who function primarily as infomercial salespeople.  

In the past, THR’s “New A-List” was reserved for actors rising quickly to the top—the ones to watch. In fact, THR did publish a New A-List of Movie Stars a few months prior. Perhaps THR was simply making a new list, one filled with these types of salespeople. But the accompanying text was leveled at “Hollywood,” as if these salespeople were the new inhabitants. And that was quite inaccurate.  

Hollywood is dead. These salespeople are too late and too off-target to have been a part of it. 

Hollywood was amazing. 

It was something beautiful and singular and frustrating and hard and touching and incredible, and I think it’s a crime that we destroyed it.  

A crime. 

I’ll tell you what it was like, up to the last era of Hollywood. There was a high concentration of talented artists. There was enough room for everyone who had the luck, the determination, and the talent. Room for new actors, directors, and writers to come into the established business. There was a place for the Farrah Fawcetts and the Sir Lawrence Oliviers. 

There were Gatekeepers, Tastemakers, and Kingmakers. Up through the gatekeeping and tastemaking filters, these talents would emerge. Time would be taken to promote their work and their image. Careful decisions would be made to maintain the quality of their output. And new arrivals paid respect to those who were already here, those who had built the business up for these newcomers to flourish.  

Money was paid to everyone, and there seemed to be enough to go around. Residuals were healthy and could sustain those between jobs. Distribution was clear and steady, whether on TV, in a cinema, or on DVD or video.  

There were parties and meetings and lucky encounters with all kinds of executives, actors, directors, cinematographers, costumers, etc. And all of it happened in person. It was an entity, a world, and a group that you earned your way into; and you knew that your reputation was going to matter now and in the future. You wanted the respect of those around you. You wanted to be worthy of being brought onto their projects. All of this mattered to everyone in the business, and the audience knew it when they saw the resulting work.  

But, that structure—the emotional and financial scaffolding necessary to support that film business—is gone. In its place, we have something of a conveyor belt, churning out “content,” with only a few standouts once in a while. 

So, how did Hollywood die?  

About 15 years ago, the studios had become too focused on films that made hundreds of millions of dollars. Streaming services saw an avenue into this business by funding and/or buying the projects that the studios had largely forgotten—the midrange award pieces like House of Cards, Manchester by the Sea, and others. That seemed good, for a bit.  

Then these streaming services (like all tech companies) needed to scale. With an eye toward global expansion, these tech companies needed more “content” where the audience needn’t know the language. And so, drama, comedy, rom-coms, and satire (which typically do not do well internationally) were pushed off, and there was a full embrace of “genre content.” Those “genres” are action, horror, and thrillers—all easy to follow without knowing the language. They filled out the platform with the inconsequential, plot-free stuff you can have playing in the background as a “second screen,” while you scroll through your Instagram feed, cook dinner, and answer emails on the “primary screen” of your phone or laptop.  

For many years, we have been locked in this Content Era. Some good work has been produced during this time, but that’s been the exception, not the rule, or the focus. The studios have all but abandoned their own 100-year-old business model and their objective to make great films, and have instead tumbled after the streaming services to try to compete with them in the tech-platform business.  

That’s not in Hollywood’s DNA. We don’t have the same goals as the tech bros. We don’t have the same kind of funding. We are not valuated in the same way, and we don’t (aren’t supposed to) make “content.”  

Then generative artificial Intelligence (GAI) arrived during the spring of 2023, for which the tech bros illegally hoovered up 100 years of copyrighted series and films (along with all your social media reels and YouTube home movies). They started spitting out little Frankenstein video spoonfuls, based on prompts. 

GAI is very good at regurgitating the past and vomiting up “content.” And because it does it faster and cheaper than any filmmaker or showrunner could, the studios and streaming services that fund and distribute films and series will use it at maximum capacity because it will widen profit margins. It will enable them to give glowing reports during their quarterly stockholder calls.  

What once was Hollywood—with its goal of making the best film or series possible, its financial structure of gathering revenue to pay its actors, directors, and crews, its residuals for artists between jobs, its camaraderie on the set, the passion behind a marketing campaign, and the triumph of making a film or series that is not only very good but has the luck of being released to the public at exactly the right time to cause a sensation—has passed.  

The audience is too fractured for anything but the most expensive marketing campaigns to work. The studios’ focus is too distracted by their stock-price performance and streaming dominance with home viewers to give the care necessary for the kinds of projects (or the cultivation of new stars) that audiences deserve. And there’s too much going on in the world, and too many ways for audiences to get that information, to draw their attention back to films and series in a meaningful way.  

This shouldn’t have happened. But the fear, the love-of-money-above-all-else, and the abandonment of that singular goal of making outstanding art, no matter the emotional or financial cost, caused the whole magic web of scaffolding to fall. 

When you have something this special, you should know better. You should know to protect it, to support the structures that make it possible for it to breathe and exhale beautiful pieces of filmed movement that change people’s lives. Because it’s not a given for it to exist. 

So, what now? What of the art of filmmaking, of those gifted in that particular arena, and of audiences who genuinely love film?  

There is a tunnel through this AI inferno (which will cause the end of the “content era”), to a glorious place on the other side: a new genre in the arts. We haven’t truly had a new genre in the arts, of any real significance, since the 1990s. In essence, this upcoming new genre has been delayed by more than 20 years because tech overstayed its moment on stage. The New has been waiting.  

Here’s the path that AI inferno will take. For years, I had wondered when this content era would finally end so we could get back to great filmmaking being the focus and not the exception. It became clear when GAI came on the scene that it would automate the “content,” and this automation would destroy the structure of our business by reducing the number of humans involved in the production of a film. Audiences will then be enamored of the AI outputs, especially when given the opportunity (for an upcharge) to be placed in the films via face replacement, etc., and it will bloom, for a while. 

After this, a few things will occur. During this time, filmmakers will have to differentiate their work from that which AI can easily imitate. That means they will make unique, raw, and creatively daring work. 

At the same time, audiences will eventually feel sick about watching AI, and about all the ways in which AI will have infiltrated their lives, their job, their kids’ education, their grocery store, their insurance, etc., and they will begin to reject it wholesale. Audiences will then not only reject films made with GAI but reject films that even look like they were made with GAI. They will want something real, raw, and obviously human.  

When you bring together those filmmakers who are doing things to differentiate their work, along with what audiences will want (and add in a bit of magic I know God is going to drop down on us), you’re going to have the birth of the most incredible creative genres we’ve ever known. It will be new to us in the way jazz or rock and roll were new at the time, or French new wave films were back then. However, this will not be a return to anything from the past, but be something entirely new. Just The New.  

I am living for that. I am making films and the Credo 23 Film Festival for that.  

So, while you go through this AI inferno, hold onto what I’ve told you as a life raft, and go through the tunnel, to The New on the other side.