The Money Sinkhole of Modern Hollywood

In 2023, Amazon Prime released a show called Citadel. It starred Richard Madden and was partly the brainchild of the Russo brothers… you probably don’t remember it at all. But that’s OK. Lots of shows come and go, even with a little star power behind them. And it wasn’t like this show had much going for it, either. The plot is derivative, action movie rubbish, stuff you might see in a B-list movie from the 80s and not give too much thought to. The difference between Citadel and an 80s B-list movie, however, is that Citadel cost $300 million to make. 

To add some extra context, Citadel is six episodes long. This means each episode cost around $50 million to produce. The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, one of the most popular television series of all time, for comparison, cost $15 million per episode. To the untrained eye, Amazon spending more money on a trite and entirely new IP than HBO spent on a flagship series might seem, for lack of a better phrase, stupid. To the trained eye, however, it is also stupid. So why did they do it, and why does it seem like the rest of Hollywood is following the exact same playbook?

Much like the reason why my Instagram reels are interspersed with videos of  AI-voiced Peter and Stewie Griffin discussing the Quran over footage of Minecraft parkour, the answer is Big Tech. The streaming model, initially a gamble taken by a Scotts Valley DVD company by the name of Netflix, ballooned to epic proportions over the early 2000s and 2010s, sending shockwaves across the industry. Tech businessmen smelled blood and invaded the movie business, looking to cash in on streaming as a new and lucrative market. Hollywood capitulated to them almost without a fight. 

Yet there remained a problem: streaming wasn’t profitable. It turns out that giving people a bunch of shows and movies at very little charge while also creating your own original content is not a sustainable business model. Who knew? Thankfully, the tech CEOs had a solution: charge more to subscribers, pay less to the people who made the films and TV shows, and sacrifice art left and right to get government tax write-offs. Struggling actors gasped at their rapidly shrinking residuals, artists gasped as their content was made inaccessible at the drop of a hat, and Hollywood executives gasped at the genius of the whole thing. The hot air machine of streaming suddenly had plenty to power it.

So now we arrive in 2023. Streaming services have become streaming giants, and, to many, their power seems inescapable. Shows like Citadel and films like Red Notice and Ghosted are churned out by Amazon, Netflix, and Apple TV, each one costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, designed merely to keep eyes on screens and wallets at the ready. To the studio heads, it doesn’t really matter whether these films and TV shows are remembered or inspire any sort of meaningful discussion; they’re instead a sort of Hollywood-sized Cocomelon that puts big actors in front of your face and asks you to pay just a little bit of attention until next month’s payment goes through. 

We’re a long way from the Golden Age of Hollywood. This is the Streaming Age (alternatively called the Big Tech Age), and, as with the introduction of sound before the Golden Age, streaming technology has fundamentally altered not just which films and shows are made, but how they’re made. The difference today is that the incentives dictating what and how art is made and released have grown deeply perverse. I don’t necessarily believe the entirety of the streaming model is antithetical to making good and capital-I Important art, but it’s clear that something needs to change if Hollywood wants to be more than just a content factory for expensive failures. If Hollywood doesn’t climb out of the money sinkhole, it will drown: art and the world will be worse off for it.

Illustration by Magdalena Yiacoumi