If the recent Hollywood strike were a movie, it would have a satisfying ending. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) got the important things they were asking for, namely better residuals for streaming shows and some protections from AI. Fran Drescher, an actor and the president of SAG-AFTRA, made a convincing case that this was a historic victory for labor and women’s empowerment, and recently said Meryl Streep was urging her to run for president of the United States.

The sequel to this saga, however, looks a lot darker. Like previous strikes, this one was instigated by a genuine reckoning for the industry. Every time there is a new technological innovation—TV sets, video cassettes, pay TV, digital downloads—Hollywood has an identity crisis. The latest tech foil was streaming. It was an exciting, generative, endlessly replicated innovation—or seemed that way until everyone started to slow down and look at the numbers. Disney, for example, has lost $10 billion on its streaming service since 2019. And many writers, actors, and studio heads felt it wasn’t working for them either. (Maybe it worked for viewers, on the nights they didn’t feel paralyzed by infinite choice.)

What were the hard truths revealed by the strike? And what will the next year of entertainment look like? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Atlantic staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li, who cover the entertainment industry, about the coming realignment of Hollywood and what we should all expect. The term “river of junk” comes up, but so does the term “focus more on curation,” which should tell you that your evenings at home on the couch are at a critical juncture.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Reporter 1: Hollywood studios and striking actors reached a deal late on Wednesday, all but ending one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry.

Reporter 2: The union says the contract includes bonuses for streaming as well as AI protections.

Reporter 3: Everybody is ecstatic and excited. This is what the union leaders are describing as historic, as extraordinary.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Last week, the union representing Hollywood actors ended a months-long strike. By all accounts, it was a complete victory for the actors, just as it was for striking Hollywood writers weeks earlier.

Both SAG (that’s the Screen Actors Guild) and the WGA (Writers Guild of America) got a lot of what they were asking for, especially more pay from streaming and protections from AI.

[Music]

This was the first dual strike in Hollywood in over 60 years. And historically, these big strikes tend to come at moments of major change in the entertainment industry.

In the ’50s and ’60s, it was TV sets. In the ’80s, video cassettes and pay TV. And then in the 2000s, downloads of shows and movies. In each of these cases, actors or writers went on strike to earn their fair share.

Now the big transition is streaming. Netflix created this new model, movie studios and TV networks scrambled to replicate it, and the streaming wars created an absurd amount of new shows. But the writers and actors making them often earned far less than they did in traditional distribution models.

Now what does this mean for us, the viewers? It means that the way we’ve gotten used to being entertained—these infinite possibilities on an ever-increasing number of streaming services—that has got to change. Because it doesn’t work for the writers. It doesn’t work for the actors. It doesn’t work for the studios. And for viewers, the seemingly endless parade of pluses—it can’t last forever.

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Rosin: So today I am talking to David Sims and Shirley Li, two Atlantic staff writers who cover Hollywood, about life after the strikes.

David, Shirley, to understand what we’re going to talk about, let’s quickly set the stage. What happened in the strike? Like, what surprised you over the months that it was happening?

David Sims: The thing that surprised me the most was the actors going on strike. That was everything to this entire story. That the actors went on strike concurrently with the writers, you know—a little after, you know, because the writers went on strike first, obviously—turned this from, to me, a fairly typical narrative of labor relations in Hollywood where the writers are often on their own, to a kind of, This is an existential moment the studios have maybe failed to confront and now must confront. And that shifted the entire narrative to me.

Shirley Li: What was most surprising, I think, was just how unprepared the studios seemed. And their reactions to the writers and the actors going on strike was just so not in their favor. Both of these strikes lasted more than 100 days, and it was the first time that the writers and actors have struck together since the ’60s. So it was a huge movement.

Rosin: David, when you said it was an existential moment, did you mean that the actors and the writers were putting out a message that something fundamentally wasn’t working?

Sims: A confrontation was maybe not going to happen over how Hollywood makes things if it was just the writers on strike. Joining the actors into it—and obviously, you know, dragging it out through many months—was a siren to the entire industry of, like, This streaming model, the way things have progressed in terms of making movies and TV, and the lack of public data about who watches anything, and the, you know, the blind leading the blind in terms of what’s even popular, that’s just not going to work going forward. We can’t all just pretend that there’s no money to go around or that we can, you know, sink hundreds of millions of dollars into unprofitable things.

So in my opinion, and I don’t know what the future holds, obviously, but I think this is probably a good thing for Hollywood to have realized about itself.

Rosin: Right. So they could no longer ignore the fact that there were giant, fundamental, existential questions that they were failing to look at.

Shirley, why don’t we first look at it from the writers’ perspective. It seemed like they weren’t just talking about straightforward pay increases, but a model—the streaming model—that made getting paid fairly kind of impossible.

Li: When you look at the ’07–’08 strike, the last one, it was more about pay than it was about the ability to make a living as a writer in Hollywood. So this time around, that was the overdue question, I’d say: Just how, how has the streaming model and the ramp up in quote-unquote “content,” especially in this post-pandemic period, how has that affected the ability for writers to write and have a career in Hollywood? You know, the streaming model has meant shorter episode orders, fewer freelance script assignments, the death of a ladder to a career. That was maybe the big question. It’s just kind of like, How do writers make a living?

Once the actors joined in, I think the question became: What do people value about Hollywood and the art that they’re making? Do viewers have an understanding of how much work goes into making what you watch?

Sims: The last strike was fought over, you know, prior issues. The internet was sort of a part of it, but stuff like streaming, making shows, had largely just kind of been consigned to, like, Well, that’s so experimental. Let’s let them make this stuff cheaply and we can sort of figure it out later. Like, Let’s let them not pay us too much.

By the time this was roaring around post-pandemic, post- the sort of streaming revolutions that have happened in the last few years, that was no longer something you could kind of just put to the side. You couldn’t just say, like, Yeah, well, Netflix, they’re trying something out.

Now it was sort of like, This is such a huge quadrant, we must make it make more sense.

Rosin: Right. So this strike was long overdue in resolving some old issues that Netflix and other studios had kind of put aside for a while. And then came this new issue, which was AI. What happened there?

Sims: To me, if Netflix in 2010 making shows is considered experimental, AI is considered basically like 99 percent unknown, right? We don’t really totally understand the ways that we can imagine scenarios that are sort of frightening to consider: oh, AI writing whole TV shows all by itself, or actors being turned into digital robots that studios control forever.

Obviously a lot of that is fanciful, but the way that AI had accelerated from something completely marginal to something that was sort of like at the forefront of technological discussion this year, I think both unions and the Directors Guild (who didn’t go on strike) felt like they had to establish a bulwark in this contract that could be built upon. Basically, You aren’t allowed to do much with this without our say so. We don’t even know what it is entirely.

Rosin: So it’s not so much about anything so specific as it is, Whatever decisions you’re going to start making about this, we participate in that decision-making process.

Li: I think it really is just a conceptual thing at this point. Both unions kind of just wanted to set up guardrails. I think this is more specific to the WGA, but it’s kind of like in the ’07–’08 strike, when they were just talking about, you know, the internet producing content and entertainment. It’s like David said, it was so experimental. And so they paid a little bit of attention to it, but then in the years since, it’s like, Oh, goodness. This is so huge, and we’re definitely not earning what we think we should be earning. We don’t even know how many people are watching the stuff that’s exclusively online, that’s exclusively streaming.

So I think that really caught them off guard. And so this time, AI similarly is, like, this conceptual thing where you don’t really know the specifics of how it’ll be deployed. But because of that, it seems even scarier, and so more necessary to just have this language that’s just setting up guardrails.

Rosin: Maybe the fear is that they could all just be one day disposable. David, was that already starting to happen? Were there other ways that streaming has been fundamentally changing their lives as creative people?

Sims: There are all these issues that are—if you just think about TV: The way TV used to be made was uniform. These seasons would run, usually for an entire year, 22 episodes or so. They would have big, robust writing rooms that were an opportunity for young writers to grow and more experienced writers to earn better, and all that.

And then streaming comes along, and more limited stuff comes along, and everything starts to get messed with. Suddenly you’ve got one guy writing an entire show, or you’ve got just a couple people. And this is a lot of the stuff that the WGA was fighting about, which is sort of, like, You’re taking away our career ladders, and you’re taking away our chances to earn and to learn.

Add AI into that mix in the future, right, and then you can just sort of imagine everything getting more extreme. You have prestige stuff from all-star people that is made at a high level, and then you have this river of junk that is created by AI and shepherded along by a couple writers, maybe, who just sort of tweak it to make sense. Where is the middle? It seems to be shrinking in terms of the stuff that gets made and in terms of the people who get hired.

Rosin: Oh my God, that is the most relatable that Hollywood’s ever felt to me. It feels like the way you played out the metaphor, it’s like: Hollywood is America.

Sims: Well, but that’s the thing. And we saw this, as Shirley said, with the studio playbook—which has always been the same—which is basically like, These writers are going on strike. They got the best job in the world. They make so much money. Like, how dare they? Right? You know, We’ll just sweat them out.

That’s always been the playbook in any of these fights. And this time, you got, of course, the message from the writers and the actors of like, You can’t kill us, because we’re already dead. You can sweat us out as much as you want, but we hate our lives, currently. So, [they] are not exactly about to be like, Oh no, we have to get back to our current crappy status.

They felt like, No, we will hold out as long as we possibly can to get a real deal. And then the public reaction is like, Yeah, I kind of get where they’re coming from. Like, I actually sympathize with these writer guys. No, their plight makes sense to me.

I think that took studios by surprise over and over again.

Rosin: And what do the studio heads think about all this? That’s after the break.

[Music]

Reporter 1: The cost of watching streaming services is up by 25 percent. Hulu, Peacock, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney—all raising prices.

Reporter 2: And then there’s Disney. It lost $512 million on its streaming business in just one quarter. It lost 11 million subscribers. But the stock is up this morning because it’s raising prices.

Reporter 3: Streaming services are losing big money on streaming. NBC, our parent company, which owns Peacock, acknowledges it loses money but says it’s worth it to be part of the future of television.

Rosin: So, we’ve talked about the writers. Let’s look at this from the studio-executive perspective. What brutal reality was no longer ignorable about this whole business model?

Sims: There’s long been economic models in Hollywood that make sense, that have existed for decades, both filmmaking and TV and stuff, of how to make money. You know, TV: You write your show, you sell ads against it, and people watch it. You put a movie in theaters, and people buy tickets to see it.

Streaming, obviously, ignores all of that. And Netflix built such an empire by deficit spending its way into creating a giant library that people feel is essential to subscribe to, and that’s worked for them. I’m not here to say, like, Netflix is going bankrupt tomorrow. The problem is that these old, lumbering studios in Hollywood decided, like, Oh God, Netflix is, you know, 10 miles ahead of us. We all have to do the same thing.

So they all spent billions of dollars worth to create their streaming services, which are of less and less interest to subscribers, who are kind of like, I have Netflix. Maybe I have another one or two of these. Like, do I need Paramount+? You know, Do I need, like, you know, AMC+? Do I need all this stuff?

And so a lot of these networks are now floundering. And we see these baffling decisions—of HBO Max being like, Let’s cut a lot of this Sesame Street stuff off our service. And I’m like, Does that make any business sense? You know, Let’s pull these movies off that we made. Let’s just remove them so no one can see them.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Sims: And, like, when you, you know, you make a call or you send an email, they’re like, Well, you know, actually taxwise it makes more money to not have that thing exist. And I’m like, Well, then that’s not a sign of a healthy economical picture.

Li: Yeah, like, if these strikes have revealed anything, it’s that Hollywood is a very poorly oiled machine. I mean, I think these studios, these networks overestimated our collective attention spans for platforms that we would subscribe to.

I mean, it is rather simple. They realized if we’re gonna do streaming, which is how most people were watching things, then you need subscribers, because that’s really the only way you’re gonna turn a profit. So to grow subscribers, then you need things in your library that are gonna attract them.

So to build things that in your library are going to definitely attract people, you launch stuff that’s based on existing IP. So then you sink a gajillion dollars into making film and television, and then you don’t maybe get as many subscribers as you want. And so now you’re very worried about turning a profit.

Rosin: So I think what I want to think about this is: It’s their fault. They’re bad business people. And also they just assumed that we didn’t value originality and creativity.

Sims: Sure. I mean, yes, I don’t think anyone’s been doing a particularly amazing job. So, Disney is sort of the lead example of a major Hollywood studio right now in any sense. And for years, obviously, the backbone of Disney was its animated films and its, you know, sort of place in the culture through that.

But you would see them for years try to figure out, like, How do we appeal to teen boys? You know, they would struggle and struggle and struggle. And then comes the 2010s.

They’re like, Forget it. We’ll just buy the stuff that appeals to the world. Let’s buy Star Wars. Let’s buy Marvel Comics. Let’s just bring these pillars of intellectual property into our big tent. And, obviously, for quite a while, that really worked for them. There was a lot of public excitement about what they did with those properties.

And once again, Hollywood—which is, as Shirley was saying, not a well-oiled machine. Everyone else is like, Well, we should just do that too. But they’re doing it with lesser and lesser pieces of intellectual property. They’re trying to spin franchises out of not much, or they’re trying to, like, get this stuff on its feet really quickly.

And, as it always goes, audiences get kind of sick of it. They recognize something after a while that is derivative, and they start to get bored of it. That is obviously something that’s happening very profoundly right now. Like, you know, with The Marvels, which just came out this weekend (it didn’t do very well), there’s a general sense in the air of like, Okay, the sort of playbook of the last 10, 15 years is over.

That’s how it always goes in Hollywood, though. Like, that is the oldest story in Hollywood. Like, as much as someone might want to bemoan the Marvel Cinematic Universe, take a look at the blockbusters that were coming out in the mid-2000s before it emerged, and you see Hollywood struggling to figure out what people want. There’s always that sort of moment of reinvention that comes.

Next year is going to be kind of weird. It’s going to be light on a lot of this stuff. And, you know, one hopes other stuff will fill its place, and people will go to the movies and watch TV, and there’ll be, you know, more interesting things. And Hollywood will copy that for a while, and eventually everyone will get sick of it, and over and over and over. And that’s how it goes.

Like, that’s sort of the most optimistic view I can have of this.

Rosin: So is Disney, to drill in, actually in trouble? Like, from the way you guys are talking, there’s a panic, and the model that they’ve been following—or thought they were following—over the last couple of years is not making anybody any money. So, do you just have faith in the fact that they’ll pivot and find another model that will keep them afloat for a while? Or is this an actual crisis moment?

Li: I mean, look, Disney+ is definitely in the red this year, right? Like, they’re not making any money. But this is true of so many studios, you know. They replicate the lowest common denominator for any other success. And Disney is maybe the most visible example of a lot of franchise projects that they announce like crazy that are all getting kind of just shuttered or delayed.

I think you’re going to see that outside of Disney, too, though. There’s a lot of structural adjustment. I mean, after these strikes, if they’re going to have to pay people more, these studios aren’t going to increase their budgets. They’re going to cut back on production.

So right now, I get the sense that they’re focusing a little bit more on curation. You see Kevin Feige stepping away from doing Star Wars. There’s only one Marvel project coming out next year. There’s this idea of like, Okay, yeah, let’s slow down. Let’s figure out what people actually want.

But like David said, it’s a cycle. They’re going to see what people want, possibly take away the wrong lessons, and then we’re going to see a wave of very similar things, and then the audience is going to get tired, and then you just have to start all over again.

Rosin: But in that sense, it seems good what happened, sort of like the strikes forced a kind of curation, less of a reliance on churning things out, and more of an emphasis on good—I was going to say the word content, but I’m not going to say it.

Sims: Someone has to say content at least once. It’s unavoidable in any Hollywood discussion.

Li: Content, content, content.

Rosin: Content! No, because in a way you’re saying the human tastes win out. Our boredom with terrible things sort of ends up influencing the movie-making culture in the end.

Sims: It does in the end, yes. It usually takes maybe a little too long, because these are big battleships they have to turn around. As much as it’s like, Oh, are superhero movies done? No, there’s a lot of superhero movies on the release calendars still, and we may be in a situation where none of them connect and it’s a huge problem. It’s more likely it’ll be kind of a mixed bag.

But there will be a shift from the dominance of one thing to the dominance of whatever’s next. Obviously, the big story this year was Barbie and Oppenheimer, which demonstrated huge public appetite for (1) the movies, the collective experience of going to see a movie, and (2) you know, just like, something different.

You know, people do like to see good things. Like, that compulsion exists.

I think during COVID, there was the fear of like, Oh God, is it over? Does nobody want to, you know, pay to see anything anymore? And it’s like, No, no, no. They’ll go if you give them something to see.

Rosin: Yeah. I would think you, David, of all people, being the staunch defender of quality theatrical-released movies that you are, might feel hopeful after the strike. Like, maybe better-quality things will come now.

Sims: I mean, that’s—I don’t want to sound that optimistic. I mean, I think that the peak-TV era—like thinking back to TV, you know, this sort of concept has been much discussed over the last 10 years: There’s so many more shows. There’s so many different networks trying to make original TV and all that. And it’s, you know—this is getting untenable. There’s hundreds and hundreds of scripted shows a year.

That was ending no matter what. It was ending with or without a strike, and with or without a reckoning in Hollywood over what things should cost to make.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Sims: But I do think now that there is maybe a little more of a sensible and realistic price tag to stuff, there’s going to be this kind of awkward and difficult shift of, Yeah, maybe there’s less stuff going around, and maybe, you know, maybe the projects are a little harder to come by, but probably for the best.

Like, so much stuff gets lost in the shuffle right now. So much work gets kind of ignored or not even shown, it might be good to narrow the field a little bit. And that might lead to an emphasis on quality.

I sound hopelessly optimistic saying that.

Rosin: No, you really didn’t, actually. Your voice sounded—the dubiousness was held in your last syllable.

Sims: I have a little dubiousness.

Rosin: So, what should we, the audiences, expect? Like, first in the immediate aftermath of the strike, for you guys who watch the industry very closely, what’s gonna make us happy on our sets and in the movie theater? And then in the long run, what happens in theaters and on TV?

Li: Well, productions are going to come back. Right after Thanksgiving is when a bunch of studio shows are going to start shooting again. So by early 2024, some of your favorite shows will probably be airing their new, shortened seasons. I mean, writers’ rooms have been open for more than a month now because the writers’ strike ended at the end of September.

So, you know, scripts have been written. Once productions resume later this month, I think you’ll get some TV that maybe you’ve been waiting to see. Maybe some. You know, if you’re, if you’re a big fan of the Chicago dramas, I know those are coming back soon.

Rosin: You mean like lower, easy-production stuff that doesn’t require a lot of visual effects and editing?

Li: Yes, exactly.

Rosin: And David, what happens to movies? Theaters?

Sims: 2024 is gonna be a little weird. I cannot deny that. It’s not like there won’t be movies. You know, there’s plenty of stuff on the schedule. Much of it is franchise material and sequels and reboots. You’ve always wanted a new Gladiator movie, right? Here you go. Or, you know, Beetlejuice is back. Everyone’s been waiting.

Like, not to dismiss those projects. They may well be good or resonate with people. But it’s a calendar that’s definitely light on what’s been an economic driver of Hollywood in the last few years, superhero movies especially, and kind of family movies in general, which have taken a little longer to return to the big screens. A lot of that got shunted to streaming out of this idea of like, Oh, well, families are just locked in their homes all the time, right? A misguided idea, in my opinion.

And probably it’s going to mean a year of hand-wringing, a year of like, What are we gonna do? Disney barely has anything. Like, How do we keep people interested?

And it will be kind of ultimately a little meaningless because it will be a year that is filled with Hollywood making stuff, trying to prepare for the next pivot. That’s the way Hollywood works. Everything takes a couple years to kind of reach our shores.

Rosin: Right, right.

Sims: So it’ll be an odd in-between time.

Rosin: Right. So we should read a novel for the next six months. Just read a lot.

Sims: Everyone should just log off and read a novel. And, obviously, there’s going to be some big election next year. I haven’t really looked into it, but I think that may, that may drive a lot of conversation.

Li: It’d be nice if people went and touched grass and voted.

Rosin: All those other things. So just, just to leave people with a little bit of entertainment excitement, you guys as critics, are there any projects that you are looking forward to?

Li: Oh, hell yeah! Right, David?

Sims: So much stuff. Yeah, I think 2024 in film kind of looks awesome.

Rosin: Okay, bring it.

Li: I think, at the top of my list: Dune 2.

Sims: Right, stuff that got pushed from this year.

Li: Yeah, stuff that got pushed. There’s, like, films like The Fall Guy that I’m like, Well, we’ll see what the Gosling has as the stuntman in a film that I’m not sure will be good. But look, I’m excited that there’s stuff that I don’t know much about, and then there’s sequels that I am excited to see.

Sims: I mean, Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to Parasite will come out in March. It’s a big sci-fi movie called Mickey 17. George Miller’s follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa, will come out in May. There are things like that, that are, you know, quote-unquote “IP” but are a little more auteur-driven movies that are probably a little weirder.

Kevin Costner is releasing two parts of some kind of gigantic Western saga that he’s, like, sinking his fortune into. And, you know, Jordan Peele is making a new movie. And, there’s another Joker movie, and, you know, that one, that went so well for the culture last time.

Li: Just can’t wait for the discourse. (Laughs.)

Sims: So there’s plenty of sort of big-scale stuff that I’m excited for. But, of course, the story of movies, especially every year, is like, there’s 20 projects you don’t know about yet, you know, that are on a smaller scale that are waiting to be discovered. Every year it’s the end of cinema. Every year, I don’t know, it kind of muddles through.

Rosin: Yeah. I feel like the category that you guys have resigned yourself to—like you’ve resigned yourself to IP, but weird IP.

Sims: Right, can we at least have fresh or interesting reboots and remakes and sequels? Yes.

Li: Yeah. I mean, reboots, remakes, sequels—they’ll exist for forever, right? But just, like, if they say something fresh, I’m on board. If they’re fun, I’m on board.

Rosin: Well, thank you guys for joining me today.

Li: Thank you.

Sims: Thank you so much for having us. Yeah.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.