Hollywood is eating itself alive, and you should care |
Culture > Popular Culture
Hollywood is eating itself alive, and you should care
Behold a visually, financially, and culturally ruinous spectacle unfolding in real time.
Joseph Ford Cotto | March 24, 2026
The 2026 awards season has laid bare a stark truth: Hollywood is no longer a tidal force that commands rapt attention. It has become a bottomless money pit. A self-destructive, crumbling empire that sacrificed broad appeal to gratify the narrow passions of its woke captors.
The Golden Globes opened the season with 8.66 million viewers, down 7 percent from the prior year’s 9.27 million, and a shadow of its 2020 peak of 18.3 million. The 68th Grammy Awards followed with 14.41 million viewers, a 6.4 percent decline from the previous year’s roughly 15.4 million. It suffered especially among adults 18–49.
Even the Oscars, hosted again by Conan O’Brien, drew only 17.86–17.9 million viewers, a 9 percent drop from 2025. This was the smallest audience since 2022, with the key 18–49 demographic plummeting 14 percent. Nielsen data confirmed that these declines were not anomalies. They reflected a continuing erosion of live broadcast audiences for Tinseltown’s once-grand spectacles.
This drop in viewers is a symptom of a deeper illness.
Hollywood’s physical and economic heart—Los Angeles—has been hemorrhaging blood for years. Film and television production in L.A. plummeted 24 percent year-over-year in major scripted projects. Total shoot days collapsed from nearly 37,000 circa 2022 to under 20,000 in 2025.
The city lost roughly 41,000 entertainment jobs between 2022 and 2024. This happened as studios consolidated and shifted work abroad. Costs were slashed amid mounting debt, approaching $80 billion, from major mergers like Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery.
The domestic box office closed 2025 at roughly $8.9 billion, flat with 2024, but well below pre-COVID-19 era levels. Wide theatrical releases continued to shrink, with only 94 films reaching more than 2,000 locations in 2024. That is a steep decline from 120 movies in 2019.
At the same time, Hollywood’s creative output has become increasingly out of step with American audiences.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the Best Picture winner at the Oscars, exemplifiesthe problem. His film is a black-comedy action-thriller........