The Endless Purge

The entertainment industry did not collapse in one year…It eroded slowly, hidden behind headlines about solidarity, record deals, and “historic” contracts. The 2023 strikes were supposed to be a line in the sand. They became the blueprint for an industry-wide redesign that dismantled the workforce, decentralized production, and redefined who holds power in a POST-Covid world. 2 years later, the entire global entertainment economy, from Los Angeles to London to Seoul, operates on a different foundation, one that no longer belongs to the people who built it.

The rhetoric of victory faded fast. The unions sold the 2023 settlements as progress, but the facts show regression. What began as a demand for fairness became an economic purge. Studios, streamers, and parent conglomerates did not just wait out the strikes but rather used them as cover to reorganize capital, eliminate payroll liabilities, and accelerate technology integration that would have otherwise faced political resistance. The result is a creative economy that is leaner, colder, and far less dependent on human labor.

Every indicator confirms contraction where it matters most. In Los Angeles, 2024 finished as the second-lowest year for local on-location filming outside of the shutdown, a drop driven by runaway production and a slower than hoped post-strike return. Across the broader U.S. market, multiple independent trackers found output materially below pre-strike levels through 2025, with global production down and the U.S. hit hardest. Georgia, once the model of domestic volume, reported film and TV spending falling from roughly $4.1B to $2.7B in fiscal 2024, an abrupt reset that confirms how quickly work can migrate. The picture is not limited to one city.

What has replaced the old center is not innovation first…It is migration. International production surged while the United States retrenched. The United Kingdom posted 5.6B£ of film and high-end TV spend in 2024, with the bulk coming from inward investment work. Ireland recorded a sharp year-over-year increase in 2024 production spend as well. These hubs combine incentives, modern infrastructure, and lower all-in labor burden. Hollywood’s old value chain no longer controls the supply. Capital and content have gone global.

The post-strike exodus was not accidental. Executives learned that dependency on a single unionized geography is an economic vulnerability. Audiences did not stop consuming because Hollywood paused. Streamers filled gaps with international pipelines. By late 2024 and into 2025, non-English titles accounted for nearly a third of Netflix viewing, which validated a permanent rebalancing toward global content flows. The door opened to a multi-center system and it has not closed.

The human toll is staggering even without theatrics. Work patterns broke. BTL professionals left for adjacent sectors because consistency vanished. The top-down narrative about “recovery” did not match ground truth in crew calendars or supplier quotes. FilmLA’s year-end readout says as much for the largest U.S. market.  

The contracts did not arrest the shift. The AI language that was framed as protection came bundled with consent frameworks and compensation rules for digital replicas, yet critics flagged exploitable gaps from day one.   The practical outcome is familiar. Tools marketed as assistive moved into replacement lanes inside casting, pre-vis, background generation, and marketing assembly. Labor celebrated headlines while corporations rewired workflows.

Industry voices called it in real time. While members marched, corporations met with consultants and re-segmented operations. Overhead deals were cut. Development boards were thinned. Divisions were merged or shuttered. The public peak-noise moment delivered a clean window to streamline.

This was not limited to Hollywood. Platform behavior changed. Netflix made a decisive move into live weekly programming with a 10-year WWE Raw deal valued at more than $5B. The message to the market was simple. Diversify revenue, diversify formats, diversify geography.

Post-COVID economics compounded the damage with costs rising while revenues lagged. Deloitte’s 2025 review frames the imbalance bluntly. Production and distribution costs keep rising while the revenue they generate falls, and advertising gravity keeps pulling toward platform giants. Insurance and risk costs did not help because commercial P&C premiums kept grinding higher through 2024, adding friction to already thin mid-tier models. Independent producers who once held the middle together were pushed out of viability. Distributors and aggregators shifted to finished-goods acquisition with less appetite for advances. 

The market hollowed out.

Exhibition felt the shock. Theaters depend on volume so when supply thins and variability rises, attendance follows. Public companies pointed directly to slate scarcity and softness in high-budget tentpoles in quarterly updates. Audiences are not rejecting cinema, they are rejecting bad math wrapped in expensive sameness.

The creative fallout is visible as the 2025 calendar produced high profile misses across studio and indie. Tron: Arse opened to $33.5M domestic and sits near $126M worldwide against an estimated $180M production budget, with trades projecting a 9-figure loss. Kiss of the Spider Woman opened at $891,046 and has reached about $1.6M dollars against a $30M. The Smashing Machine started with $5.84M domestic in its first weekend, the lowest opening of Dwayne Johnson’s career, amid reports of a roughly $50M budget. If this pattern extends into 2026, a thinner slate and admissions that remain below pre-pandemic norms will keep volatility elevated and expose the mid tier even further. The excuse remains “audience fatigue”. 

The reality is strategic indifference to product market fit.

From a macro view, the real winners were the corporations that planned ahead. The strikes gave Wall Street cover to do what it wanted to do anyway. Write-downs, headcount reductions, divisional consolidations, and a refocus on free cash flow created a cleaner story for investors. Paramount even suspended its dividend while it reworked the balance sheet and options. Profit growth came not from expansion but from contraction.

The unions mistook participation for power. Marches and moral momentum did not convert into enforceable economic leverage. Collective bargaining was not matched with collective innovation. Once automation and globalization entered the pipeline, leverage decayed.

The next generation adjusted accordingly. The creator economy kept scaling. YouTube alone paid more than $70B to creators, artists, and media companies over a recent 3-year window. That capital flow is real and it rewards speed, autonomy, and audience proximity.  The middle class of creative labor that sustained Hollywood for decades is being replaced by independent operators who do not need permission or a greenlight.

Even within the guilds, cohesion frayed. Younger members saw symbolic wins. Veterans saw time run out. Dues pressure met scarcity. Some members started looking to hybrid models and international flexibility because work followed incentives, not slogans.

The deeper tragedy is how preventable it was. Labor fought the right battle at the wrong scale. Negotiating for percentages inside an outdated model ceded the field to a different game. Corporations fought to build a new system and they did. The globalized entertainment economy is borderless and profit-centric. It answers to capital flow, data, and shareholder demand.

The lesson is brutal and simple. You CAN’T win a negotiation if you DO NOT control production. You CAN’T protect labor if you CAN’T prevent capital flight. You CAN’T preserve creativity if you treat art as an entitlement rather than an enterprise. The studios used the chaos to recalibrate the business and purge the payroll. The people who marched now face an industry that runs perfectly well without them.

Hollywood used to define AMBITION…It now defines DENIAL. The lights are still on, the billboards are still bright, but the power behind them sits with a smaller, more concentrated set of interests that classify human labor as a cost center. The strikes were supposed to protect the future of storytelling BUT automation accelerated instead. The studios won the long game because they embraced the economic reality that emotion DOES NOT outweigh math.

The era of sympathy picket lines and moral victories is over. The real work is reconstruction. Survival requires international coordination, digital ownership, and enforceable standards that reflect how entertainment is actually made in 2025...and beyond. Without that shift, the next contract will get negotiated from even weaker ground.

History will record 2023 as capital’s revenge. 

The industry DID NOT rebound. 

IT reconfigured. 

What was once an American export now behaves like a global algorithm. The people who made it possible are out of work, out of leverage, and out of patience. The corporations are not evil. They are efficient. Efficiency wins when empathy refuses to do the math.