2026-03-18XThread

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Hollywood is over. It's all Internet now. https://t.co/NFESPUnk0F I am sympathetic to @RamboVanHalen and his critique of KPI-driven clickbait. Obviously, there's truth to it. On the other hand, for generations, Hollywood's blind spots were obvious. Thanks to the decentralization of media, new stories will get told. Eventually, some will become art. https://t.co/33f21QciD8 @RamboVanHalen Yeah, but streaming is a transitional form. It will likely be replaced by AI-generated video over time. Streaming already competes with everything else on the Internet. You don’t commit to a two hour stream. Users click away quickly. Moreover, AI video will reduce the cost of hiring new actors (who are often hard to manage) and increase the lifespan of old ones indefinitely. So you’ll see Stallone and Schwarzenegger, in their prime, forever. They’ll be like Mickey Mouse. In a real sense, American culture is now a “finished product”, like French culture. It’s not like France is innovating on baguettes and the Eiffel Tower. Similarly, thanks to AI, you will see endless remixes of the past glory days of America, especially the 1980s, but also earlier eras. You already see that now on X. All the romanticized past. That’s part of why Hollywood is getting deprecated. You can only tell the same stories, the same sequels, with the same actors, to the same audience, so many times. Meanwhile, all cultural innovation has moved to the Internet. @RamboVanHalen You’re talking about the late Soviets. By the Brezhnev era, I agree, they weren’t as psycho. But the early Soviets, namely Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin, did a whole lot of evil that could fill dozens of movies. Lenin’s Hanging Order White Sea Labor Canal The Russian Civil War The Red Terror Katyn Forest Berlin Airlift Just off the top of my head. All very dramatic stories that could become films.

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@balajis @RamboVanHalen Nazis are far better villains, because commies are sad, low IQ biomass and boring. They exemplify the BANALITY of evil. Soviets had some great weapons, so they were OK in some Bond movies. But Nazi's are your father. The people you resent for being better than you.
state_secession ↗

@balajis coal mine didn't close, it changed owners. streamers spend $101B on content this year with the same Hollywood talent
wildpinesai ↗

I put in 25 years. It would be 26 but I haven't worked yet this year and I'm not sure I'll ever work in entertainment again. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. But it's a sad thing--especially since the collapse of Hollywood is (mostly) self inflicted. Outsiders like to blame the unions and burdensome regulations. That's not exactly wrong, but the big reason is that Hollywood stopped making a product that people wanted to consume. Film is a funny thing. On one hand it's art. But on the other it's a mass consumer product--like a car, or a soft drink. But unlike a typical consumer product, it was something we consumed together. We went to a special place, and sat with strangers, and watched stories. And those stories infected us. They entered our minds and our souls and they implanted things. Deep things. Ancient things. Timeless things. Things like heroism and beauty and love and fear and sex and death and adventure and tragedy and pain and injustice and all the things that make up our dreams. There's a thing we call "cinematic language". It's how we tell a story with images. (And BTW if you want to learn more about the language of visual media, read Scott McCloud's excellent book Understanding Comics.) An odd thing about cinematic language is that it's the same language as dreams. There's a scene in Christopher Nolan's Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio is explains to (the tragic) Ellen Page how dreams work. But what he's really describing is cinematic language. Inception is really a movie about movies BTW. While it's far from my favorite film, I think it's the perfect film. Because the suspension of disbelief is perfect. You believe the plot about dreams because you're familiar with how movies work--maybe not consciously--but you know. Everyone knows. Maybe not everyone has seen a movie, but everyone has dreams. Another odd thing about film: you don't "watch" a movie, you look into it. And you put yourself inside it. Now you're in the dream. And you're hypnotized. Because movies do that too. The motion--the moving images--they hack your brain. We're programed to pay attention to moving things. Even when the things aren't real. Even when they're just light reflected off a screen. So we'd go to these special places--these movie theaters--these temples--and we'd sit, and we'd "watch" and we'd enter the dream. And we did it together. And after the movie was over--and the lights came on, and we'd file out over the sound of popcorn crunching under our feet--we were different. We had become transformed. Sometimes we were changed in minor ways. But sometimes not. Sometimes we were changed in profound ways. And we did it together. Before the movie we were a room full of strangers. But after--on the way out the door--we all had something in common. Because we shared an experience. We'd shared the dream. And we'd all become transformed. And then tech got involved... Streaming turned movies from a communal experience to a personal experience. And that's an issue, but they did something else too. They started developing movies as if they were tech products. But you can't apply a KPI to a dream. At least, not successfully anyway. Because dreams don't work like that--nor does any sort of art. And that's a funny thing about making movies. You try to make the best film you can, but at the end of the day you have no idea if it's good or if it's going to be successful. You just have to hope the audience likes it. Now, you can design a movie that will appeal to a preexisting audience. Marvel movies are like this. There's a large group of fanboy nerds that will see every single one. You can count on them every time. Just like you can count on the Gay Oscar Bait crowd (for example). But those movies are slop. But Hollywood became specialists in slop. Because slop is safe. Because you could apply KPI style metrics to slop. As a result they lost the audience. And the audience is probably never coming back. I wrote a book in 2024 (that was published in 2025). While writing, I thought of it as my farewell to the industry. But looking back, what I was actually writing was a eulogy for Hollywood--the place where dreams were made. And so it goes...
RamboVanHalen ↗

Production days in LA are down nearly half and the entertainment industry is feeling it. A friend, who has been working as an editor for over 25 years, compared it to a coal mine shutting down. https://t.co/ISLLVqNXHv
FARlikewhoa ↗