Can Hollywood navigate AI, streaming wars and labor struggles? | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on July 18, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: Last year’s strikes by both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writer’s Guild, new technology such as generative AI, and a global pandemic have all drastically changed film production in Hollywood. Adding to the issues facing the big screen is the continuing trend of moviegoers bypassing theatrical releases in favor of watching films on the small screen. Is Hollywood ready for a reboot? Henry Jenkins, Professor at the University of Southern California, joins The Excerpt to talk about the current state of moviemaking here in America.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, July 18th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

From the days of the five-cent Nickelodeon to today's 40X auditoriums where the seats move with the on-screen action along with other special effects, going to the movies has long been a national pastime. But last year's Hollywood strikes by both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild, new technology such as generative AI, and the global pandemic have all drastically changed film production in Hollywood. Adding to the issues facing the big screen is the continuing trend of moviegoers bypassing theatrical releases in favor of watching films on the small screen. Is Hollywood ready for a reboot? Here to talk about the current state of movie making is Henry Jenkins, provost professor of communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Henry.

Henry Jenkins:

Happy to do it.

Dana Taylor:

I mentioned some of the headwinds Hollywood studios have been facing, and I want to discuss each of them individually. Let's start with last summer's Hollywood strikes. What's been the impact on Hollywood film production in the aftermath?

Henry Jenkins:

Well, I think they're doing pretty well at spreading out the release of things. We've long ago left the September season structure that we grew up on television, and so we're getting television rolled out across the year. So I don't think we're feeling the gap fully yet. I still think it's going to be three or four months out before we hit the real shortage there. Similar with the films, we're seeing fewer new releases every weekend, but we're still seeing the gradual rolling out of content, so they're doing a good job of masking the behind the scenes impact of this. But I suspect there's a moment coming where we're going to feel a gap again.

Dana Taylor:

One point of contention was the use of generative AI and its integration into the filmmaking process. Where does that stand today?

Henry Jenkins:

Well, I think the Writers Guild and the other guilds won some important concessions on this, but it will remain a problem. It's going to remain an active debate. So as one person explained it to me, suppose an AI writes a script and it's a crappy script and it's given to a writer to rewrite and revise and [inaudible 00:02:36] writer, the AI still and the studio thus own the script and get the dominant share of the residuals from the product, whereas the writer who may have actually turned it into something is now getting secondary revenue, less revenue, less credit than they would've gotten if a writer had come up with a story on their own. It had been revised. So that's their fear, that they're going to be working in the future, is rewrite artists for bad AI scripts for the foreseeable future.

Now, having spent time with some of the write text generative AI, I think they can generate something on the order of a CBS sitcom right now, but they're not capable of doing stuff that's innovative, that's rich and human, but that they're improving at a dramatic rate. And so I think the writers wanted to stop this process as best they could before it became a serious problem for them.

Dana Taylor:

CBS sitcom writers may want to have a word with you.

Henry Jenkins:

I know. I know. But point being, a network sitcom is much more formulaic at this point. So I don't mean to slam a CBS writer, but the point is that right now they're so constrained by formulas that AI probably could take the first step in mapping a formula for an episode, particularly if a human agent gave them a prompt that was fairly had an idea and at a kernel that then the AI could develop it, but then it would take still a really good human writer to revise it and make it funny. What we know as AIs don't have a very good sense of humor so far.

Dana Taylor:

Henry, how close is Hollywood to matching its pre-pandemic production levels? Is that the goal and should it be the goal?

Henry Jenkins:

I would say yes and no. I think my advice, if any Hollywood studio ever asked me, would be shift away from the big blockbusters, which are not doing particularly well at the current moment, that strategy seems to be in decline, and shift towards smaller niche productions that are consistently earning back return on investment. So I would say look at horror and Blumhouse and A24 films are consistently coming in at low budgets and earning well above their level. Maybe not number one in a weekend, but number three or four or five. And those films make back their cost in a way that some of the films we're seeing at the top of the charts never do. We could do the same with animation, with YA content, for content for older consumers. If I'm an exhibitor, bringing in more Indian and Chinese content, Japanese content. There was a week in December last year where two of the top three money earners in the US were from Japan. But lots of us are pushing for Hollywood to make smaller and more niche productions and more things, not less.

Dana Taylor:

So you just opened the door to production overseas. Tell me about how globalization has affected the film industry here in the US. I know that you recently spent time overseas in South Korea and China specifically. How are the moviemaking industries there impacting Hollywood?

Henry Jenkins:

What we saw last year is of the top 20 moneymakers in China last year, 199% of them were made within China. Korea has become a cross-media powerhouse between K-drama, K-film, K-pop. It's dominating the world's pop culture marketplace. What I've been predicting, I think as we're going to see, is for the 21st century, there's going to be a jostling for position from three to four powerful media industries in Asia. China is not yet affecting our consumption in the US that much, but India, Japan, South Korea are jostling for global dominance over pop culture marketplace, and Hollywood is probably going to start sliding to fourth or fifth place in that competition. It means that Hollywood can't count on international revenue to recoup cost of these big blockbusters. And it's one of the reasons why support of them is failing. It's not just that we aren't going to see them in the theaters as the people around the world also are not as interested in superhero movies, say, than they used to be.

Dana Taylor:

Sports stadiums and concert venues routinely sell out now. It's been a different story for movie theaters post-pandemic. Why do you think that is?

Henry Jenkins:

If you go to a concert and it's a total event, that is the social dimensions are so important, the whole sensory experience of a concert. You can't experience the concert in an all-engulfing way at home. The more we are going to postage-stamped screens and multiplexes and the more television screens expand in size in American's homes, the more they start to become equivalents to each other. The more we're seeing, we can replace the screens we have now in many cases with a big-screen TV set and have almost the same degree of engulfing experience.

Dana Taylor:

Hollywood has long put out prequels and sequels. But how has the rise of transmedia shaped decisions made by filmmakers and studios?

Henry Jenkins:

Let's explain what transmedia is. It's storytelling across media. It's storytelling where more than one medium weighs in, not in a redundant way that we're playing the film on streaming and in the theater on day of release, which is another phenomenon, but as the Marvel cinematic and television universe come together, right? So we can see a storyline begin on WandaVision and continue into the next Dr. Strange movie or something. Those kinds of connections, fans love them. Hardcore fans love them. They work to build interest and to build awareness and to allow for greater complexity in our storytelling than any one medium can support, but they also add to this layer of complexity that leaves some readers in the wick, right? If you don't feel like you can go to the movie and understand it without having seen four TV shows and played two games and read 15 comics, then you're going to get into trouble.

And so those of us who've been advocating for transmedia as an approach have always said the film, or whatever the mothership is, has to be self-contained. And this other material generates some Easter eggs, some things we follow, that we want to reward the fans and our awareness of it, or rabbit holes where we might want to go burrow deeper into the story, and there is a TV series or so forth that allows us to explore that content. But if the core story requires us to consume multiple media before we enter the theater, it creates a problem, an obstacle for some audiences to get into the product.

Dana Taylor:

There have been several huge box office successes over the past year from last year's Barbie and Oppenheimer films to the recently released Inside Out 2. These are three very different movies. What can Hollywood glean from their success?

Henry Jenkins:

A friend of mine, a British scholar named Peter Kramer, has been tracking box office hits throughout the history of cinema, and he says, particularly post World War II, the films that have tended to do better in the box office have been family films, not just in the sense of all four quadrants' interest, that is the adults and kids get something out of the experience. And we could think about Barbie as a great example of that. Takes a children's franchise, adds an adult layer to it. But it's films about the dynamics of the family. And particularly the dominant plot is a father, say, who's left his family behind, or a family undergoing divorce or so forth, and how they're brought back together. The reconstruction of the family is the central plot.

Now Oppenheimer doesn't meet any of those. There we would have to think about Christopher Nolan's history of box office successes, the way rather cleverly that film attached itself to the Barbie phenomenon. So we have the Barbieheimer sort of phenomenon of last summer. But I think more typical of all of that would be Inside Out or now the Despicable Me, these are family films in the classic sense. There are animated films that also appeal to adults and often deal with disruption or changes within the family. The case of entering adolescence and a discord, breaking up with friends in the case of Inside Out. There's a weird father-child relationship, which between the primary villain and the Minions in the Despicable Me series, that functions a bit like a family. So that formula doesn't seem to have changed.

Dana Taylor:

The story of Hollywood is told in eras. Is this the end of an era and do you think that Hollywood is not so simply reinventing itself?

Henry Jenkins:

Well, I think if I'm right about everything I've said so far, it may be the end of the era of the blockbuster and the beginning of an era more defined around niches. But that's a different model of how a multiplex might work than the blockbuster model we've been in for the last decade or two. As much as I think the survivor are going to be independent theaters, I also think that multiplexes could adapt to a niche market model and probably thrive better than they're doing with a blockbuster model.

Dana Taylor:

Henry, thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt.

Henry Jenkins:

I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.