A long-predicted but still historic tipping point in the history of moving pictures was reached earlier this year when data revealed that less than half of US TV viewing time was now made up of live broadcast or cable TV. The inexorable shift to streaming and video on demand that drove the emergence of Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video shows no sign of abating. And whether you’re a small national broadcaster like RTÉ or a giant of the modern TV age like HBO, that reality is coming for your lunch, if it hasn’t eaten it already.
But what’s going on beneath the surface of that overall trend is more complicated, more interesting and ultimately more consequential. The era of peak TV, when streamers flush with Silicon Valley cash commissioned unrealistic quantities of drama in the race to gain a competitive edge on their rivals, is over. Netflix is rolling out its cheaper, ad-supported option to subscribers in many territories (although not Ireland yet). It’s investing more in “unscripted” reality formats and less in expensive sequential drama. Disney+ is following suit. Platforms are culling their catalogues in an attempt to reduce costs. The law of diminishing returns seems finally to have kicked in for the exhaustingly overextended Marvel Cinematic Universe. In July Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, announced cutbacks in spending on its Star Wars and Marvel franchises, saying the explosion in Marvel TV shows in recent years had “diluted focus and attention”.
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Streaming services are becoming more like traditional TV: cheaper, with fewer dramas and more ads. All of this forms the backdrop against which the current writers’ and actors’ strikes are playing out. For the strikers, Iger (annual salary $27 million, or €24.9 million) became a hate figure when he described their demands for better pay and limits on the use of AI as unreasonable.
At the heart of the strike is the impact the shift to streaming has had on the traditional ways that writers and actors were compensated for their work. The payment of residuals – additional fees that fall due when a series or film is resold or relicensed to secondary broadcasters – doesn’t apply when a show is solely produced for a single streaming platform. And series tend to be shorter on streaming services than used to be the case on network television. So there’s less work and it’s less well paid. As a result, average fees have been on a downward slide for years while, the strikers point out with some justification, salaries for executives such as Iger keep going up.
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With the media and entertainment industries consolidating into a handful of megacorporations, new figures emerge with new strategies, such as David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, the vast, recently assembled media empire that includes the Warner Bros studios, CNN and HBO. Zaslav, who puts Iger in the shade with the eye-watering $500 million he was paid between 2018 and 2022, lives in the Hollywood mansion formerly occupied by the legendary 1970s producer Robert Evans.
Unlike Evans, he’s a specialist in mergers and acquisitions rather than scripts and casting, and, as a profile in the New Yorker this week laid out, he’s most famous as a relentless costcutter at the companies he runs. The complex series of deals he brokered that led to the creation of Warner Bros Discovery mean that a lot of cash has to be extracted quickly from the various components. Zaslav has already laid off hundreds of workers, scrapped two almost completed films (including the $90 million Batgirl) and killed CNN+, the news channel’s recently launched attempt at a streaming platform.
He also embarked on what proved to be a chaotic attempt to reposition CNN on the American political spectrum, allegedly at the behest of his patron, the billionaire Irish-American cable-TV mogul John Malone (who has a range of Irish interests, including Virgin Media). Meanwhile, he faces the challenge of reviving Warner Bros Pictures, the legendary film studio that celebrated its centenary this year but has failed to match Disney’s Marvel success with its own DC franchise.
[ ‘It was our film and Oppenheimer. I thought, What the f**k? This is crazy’Opens in new window ]
[ Oppenheimer is a great film about the wrong manOpens in new window ]
All of which suggests one explanation for the relative equanimity these executives have shown towards the suspension of production and promotion that has followed the writers’ strike that began on May 2nd and the actors’ strike that has been running since July 14th. If the industry has been producing too much content, then a hiatus of a few months might even make sense. And the spectacular success of Barbenheimer – the two films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, this week topped a combined $2 billion in box-office receipts – has yet to prove that the habit of cinemagoing has fully returned. The film and television industries remain at a crossroads, unsure of what comes next.
