The dawn of 2025 sees us facing turbulence and uncertainty on Day One. Three days ago all still felt normal. Prediction: It won’t last long.
The impending arrival of a second Donald Trump presidency, this time backed by a win of the popular vote, means we need to buckle up, hunker down and prepare for all the things that we can’t exactly guess at that are coming. But they’re coming.
I can feel the investment bankers salivating for the coming M&A business. And I can feel liberal media girding its loins for battle. It does appear that we will have a Cabinet full of former Fox personalities, and that will be interesting. And good news for the bros: being white and male is going to be back in style.
But in our own backyard, Hollywood seems unlikely to put up much of a fight in what is sure to be a shifting cultural landscape. If we didn’t see the studio CEOs heading down to Mar-a-Lago post-election like tech titans Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and even possibly Bill Gates, no one is looking to be a liberal hero either. The industry’s power brokers follow the prevailing winds — it’s what they do.
A year ago we were emerging from the fever dream of two Hollywood strikes and trying to fathom how AI was going to remake our world. A year later, here’s my assessment of what turned out to be the really big shifts in our shifting world — the end of media, the rise of antisemitism, the stalling of DEI — and what lays the groundwork for another year of disruption.
But perhaps it’s not the disruption we thought was coming.
The ecosystem of news media has been cracking for two decades, but in 2024 it fully fell apart. While we’ve become accustomed to the bloodletting of constant layoffs in legacy newsrooms (and that’s still happening), now we’re seeing premium talent ditching their jobs to start independent news organizations like Bari Weiss’s Free Press, Oliver Darcy’s Status, Kara Swisher’s podcasts or — like Don Lemon and Megyn Kelly — thriving YouTube channels.
The coup de grâce was the presidential election, in which liberal cable news went to war against Trump and failed to stop his win, while billionaire newspaper owners at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times bucked their newsrooms and refused to endorse Kamala Harris. This was a tipping point that will stand in history. Now almost two full months after the election people have still not tuned back in to the news. Personally, I am finding other ways to stay informed, which means grazing across a much wider set of news sources. It requires a more skeptical filter. It’s less efficient. And I miss stuff. But even though I know we need it, mainstream news has lost me for the moment.
Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with anything because it does. The shocking rise of antisemitism (not “anti-Zionism” or “anti-Israel sentiment”) in mainstream institutions, whether that’s the BBC, Columbia University or Irish and Canadian government offices, augurs badly for good people everywhere. It doesn’t take a trained student of history to know that when societies start demonizing Jews, catastrophe usually ensues for both the Jews and those societies.
Hollywood remains an industry where Jews and Jewish culture are deeply embedded. The tension between progressives who have found new language to delegitimize Israel has left Jews in Hollywood feeling isolated and fearful, as TheWrap has reported all year. The shocking omission of Jews from the Motion Picture Academy’s new museum celebrating the history of Hollywood and the insensitive (to be generous) approach in fixing the omission by using offensive stereotypes about Jews was an example of a point of view that cannot simply be dismissed as a blind spot.
This will continue to be a tough conversation. Let’s have it.
It was bound to happen. Pendulums swing, and this pendulum is swinging pretty hard. After a peak national surge to combat racism in the wake of George Floyd’s horrific murder by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, DEI programs — adopted at C-suite levels at media and entertainment companies — are in retreat across the board. Some executives quit in frustration after concluding there was no real support for prioritizing diversity, while other companies cut departments and positions as part of their broader layoffs.
If Kamala Harris’s election loss meant anything at the symbolic level for women and people of color, it also sent a shot across the bow of diversity and inclusion activists. After the Trump campaign successfully demonized trans people, a backlash against the trans and LGBTQ community seems already underway, as TheWrap has reported. The discussion about being an “anti-racist” has turned into a right-wing punchline. And Hollywood is quietly beginning to phase out plot lines — like on a recent Pixar series — that delve into DEI questions.
This all seems bad. But. A conversation about what DEI should mean — who draws the lines, who makes those rules, and what role the social media mob plays — seems long overdue.
Unfortunately, first there will be backlash.
Five years ago Hollywood made a fateful pivot into streaming. Disney+, Warner’s Max, NBCU’s Peacock and Paramount+ got massive investments from their parent companies as legacy cable channels and broadcast were starved for resources.
This year, nearly all of those services found bright moments of profitability, while the shrinking cable businesses got write-offs like some kind of bastard children.
Meanwhile, Netflix — unburdened by any millstones of cable — soared with its subscribers and nascent sports programming and ended the year at a massive high share price on Wall Street.
This year cemented the status of streaming in entertainment.
Thousands of jobs were disappeared this year, just like in “The Leftovers.” Poof. It’s hard to believe that those jobs in reality television, visual effects and across the board production will be coming back anytime soon.
A studio chief who shall remain nameless and genderless told me recently that the deals struck by the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild in 2023 appeared to achieve a whole host of increased benefits for working actors and writers. But the reality, said this studio chief, is that the new contracts have made production so much more expensive that going offshore is now an imperative to make money. And the increased cost has stifled production decisions as every nickel gets scrutinized.
On the other hand, Hollywood companies slimming down to adjust to new economic realities was probably a brutal necessity. And as efficiencies continue to emerge with artificial intelligence, the year Hollywood hung in there may swing back to a 2025 where solid profit can reemerge.
Merriam-Webster: Oligopoly noun ol·i·gop·o·ly ˌä-lə-ˈgä-pə-lē ˌō-: a market situation in which each of a few producers affects but does not control the market.
We have been told by the experts that the United States under Trump 2.0, led by a crony Cabinet and a slavish Congress — will become an oligopoly. But that doesn’t quite capture Elon Musk, does it?
We might have to coin a new term for what Musk now represents on the American landscape. We’ve never had one before. An unelected, shadow political force with a grip on the presidency-elect (bought and paid for) who wields technological power, mass media power, celebrity power. All while enamored of the spotlight and his own perceived infallibility, a desire to meddle in all aspects of science, health, communication, public policy and politics. And all while on heavy ketamine use because who could survive that overactive brain without relief?
Throw in for good measure an apparently inexhaustible supply of money because, and you may know this, he’s the richest man in the world, with his wealth recently topping $400 billion, according to Forbes.
Wish us luck in 2025.
The post Truthbombs of 2024: Media Is Over, Antisemitism Is Cool, DEI Is Kaput appeared first on TheWrap.
