Daniel Bessner has an interesting piece in the current Harper’s Magazine: The Life and Death of Hollywood. It covers both the movie and TV side of the business as the merge into the world of streaming media and is focused on writers, who are making less and less money in ever more circumscribed roles. Here's a passage from 2/3rds of the way into the article that is about the movie side:
Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest, he said. “There’s a sort of dry run for the story.” Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, “It’s a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible.”
Brancato, who himself found work on Catwoman and two movies in the Terminator franchise in the early Aughts, told me that by the middle of the decade, no one wanted original scripts. IP had proved extremely valuable on the international market—increasingly important as domestic box-office growth stagnated over the course of the Aughts and 2010s—and it began to make up a greater and greater share of studio output. According to the media historian Shawna Kidman, franchise movies had accounted for around 25 percent of all studios’ wide-release features in 2000; in 2017 they made up more than 64 percent.
The shift to IP further tipped the scales of power. Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, “Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.” At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story. “Working on these big franchises is a little bit like being a stonemason on a medieval cathedral,” Stentz told me. “I can point toward this little corner, or this arch, and say, That was me.” Within this system, writers have sometimes been withheld basic information, such as the arc of a project. Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series’ single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show. Marvel also began to use so many writers for each project that it became difficult to determine who was responsible for a given idea. Multiple writers who worked on Guardians of the Galaxy, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and Thor: Ragnarok have forced WGA arbitration with the company to recoup the credits and earnings that they believe they’re due.
Marvel’s practices have been widely emulated, especially for franchise productions. “Every other studio with big tentpole movies has tried to imitate the Marvel model,” Stentz told me, including “throwing waves of writers at the same project.” “In some cases,” he said, “they’ve gone even further, by convening entire writers’ rooms”—a standard practice only in television. Both the Avatar sequels (one of which is not yet out) and Terminator: Dark Fate were developed this way, he said.
“When there’s high-profile IP involved,” Brancato told me, “writers tend to be treated as disposable.” “Everybody’s feeling fucked over,” he said. “The general sense is that you’re an absolutely fungible widget, and they don’t any longer take you seriously. It’s so broken. I mean, really, it is fucking broken.”
And on the TV side:
The price of entry for working in Hollywood had been high for a long time: unpaid internships, low-paid assistant jobs. But now the path beyond the entry level was increasingly unclear. Jason Grote, who was a staff writer on Mad Men and who came to TV from playwriting, told me, “It became like a hobby for people, or something more like theater—you had your other day jobs or you had a trust fund.” Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer a decade in, said, “There are periods of time where I work at the Apple Store. I’ve worked doing data entry, I’ve worked doing research, I’ve worked doing copywriting.” Since he’d started in the business in 2014, in his mid-twenties, he’d never had more than eight months at a time when he didn’t need a source of income from outside the industry.
In the end, the precarity created by this new regime seems to have had a disastrous effect on efforts to diversify writers’ rooms. “There was this feeling,” the head of the midsize studio told me that day at Soho House, “during the last ten years or so, of, ‘Oh, we need to get more people of color in writers’ rooms.’ ” But what you get now, he said, is the black or Latino person who went to Harvard. “They’re getting the shot, but you don’t actually see a widening of the aperture to include people who grew up poor, maybe went to a state school or not even, and are just really talented. That has not happened at all.” To the extent that this was better than no change, he said, “Writers’ rooms are more diverse just in time for there not to be any writers’ rooms anymore.”
By the end of the 2010s, it was clear that something had to give or the industry would be facing a dearth of trained talent. “The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years,” Blake Masters, a writer-producer and creator of the Showtime series Brotherhood, told me. “Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it.” Grote said much the same thing: “Prestige TV wasn’t new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through.”
Netflix, the other streamers, and the networks weren’t just destabilizing the careers of individual writers: they were stealing from the industry’s future. But things were once again worse than they seemed. The streamers, which would soon employ about half of TV-series writers, were thoroughly speculative ventures, and they were set to expand and contract with the whims of the market.
On the new Writer's Guild contract:
In the end, that solidarity succeeded in establishing a new streaming-residuals model—based on numbers of views—minimum staffing requirements and lengths of employment for TV writers’ rooms, and at least two rounds of guaranteed work for feature screenplays. The union had also forced streamers to release some viewership data, and had established that AI could not be given writing credit for anything: a human author would have to be involved and paid, regardless of AI output.
But as the dust has settled, it has become clear that there are several significant problems with the new agreement. The writers’-room staffing rules kick in only if a showrunner decides to bring on help at the start of a deal; otherwise, they can write a season on their own. It would often benefit them to go the latter route—budgets, after all, are shrinking—and studios would likely prefer this. One writer told me that by the start of 2024, he’d already seen showrunners use the loophole. As for the data-sharing agreement, a closer look reveals it to be, as deWaard put it, “very limited, and very fragile.” The studios will share viewership information with a limited number of WGA administrators for high-budget shows. The guild can then release that information only in a summary form, which, in the words of the contract, aggregates the data “on an overall industry level.” The guild cannot share any information at all on the performance of individual shows. A WGA representative told me that there would be no secondary process for writers to obtain that data.
The threshold for receiving the viewership-based streaming residuals is also incredibly high: a show must be viewed by at least 20 percent of a platform’s domestic subscribers “in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year.” As Bloomberg reported in November, fewer than 5 percent of the original shows that streamed on Netflix in 2022 would have met this benchmark. “I am not impressed,” the A-list writer told me in January. Entry-level TV staffing, where more and more writers are getting stuck, “is still a subsistence-level job,” he said. “It’s a job for rich kids.”
Conover said that the most important facts were that guild leadership had kept members unified and that a new streaming-residuals structure was now in place; they could fight to raise the rates during the next round of negotiations, in 2026.
What to do?
The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.
None of this is likely to happen. The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector.
There's much more in the article. It's worth reading in full.
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