Box office bombs. Cable’s collapse. What went wrong for Hollywood in 2024

Note: The Wide Shot newsletter will be off next week.

When chronicling what went wrong in Hollywood in 2024, it’s hard to narrow down the list to a reasonable length for this column. Particularly in a year that included Rupert Murdoch’s succession battle, Diddy’s arrest and Blake Lively accusing her “It Ends With Us” co-star Justin Baldoni of waging a smear campaign.

Last week, we covered what went right in an otherwise tough year. But now, let’s focus on the challenges. Here are the entertainment industry’s top debacles, switcheroos, failures and downward trends of the year.

L.A.’s production economy implodes

The Golden State knows it has a crisis on its hands. Filming activity hit dramatic lows in the Los Angeles area this year, driven by studio cost-cutting amid a broader industry retrenchment and the relocation of productions to cheaper locales, including the U.K. and Central Europe. Even reality TV productions moved away.

Some executives have placed much of the blame for the downturn on the increased costs of labor due to last year’s strikes, a contention union leaders have rejected. An undisputed factor has been California’s inability — or unwillingness — to compete with tax incentives offered by other states and countries.

Political leaders now are trying to do something about it. Businesses that depend on the state’s entertainment economy are rallying behind Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to increase California’s annual film and TV tax credit allocation from $330 million to $750 million. It’s unclear, however, whether even that boost will be sufficient.

The Hollywood and media ‘resistance’ cracks

Left-leaning celebrities weren’t shy about backing Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid. But a media and tech industry that was often openly critical of President Trump’s first administration is looking much more conciliatory this time around. OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Facebook’s parent, Meta, contributed to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Amazon reportedly did as well.

And in what was widely interpreted as a capitulation to the incoming administration, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle Trump’s defamation case against the news organization over George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air statement that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for rape (Trump was found liable for sexual abuse).

This comes amid a broader move away from politics for Hollywood and related industries. In a recent example, ABC’s parent company, Walt Disney Co., recently acknowledged removing a transgender storyline from an upcoming animated series. As my colleague Meg James wrote, Disney and its Chief Executive, Bob Iger, want out of the culture wars.

“Woke” isn’t dead in Hollywood. But the contrast with the progressive surge of the late 2010s and early 2020s is stark.

Warner Bros. Discovery loses the NBA

David Zaslav took a lot of heat in 2024, but his biggest loss was the failure to secure a new NBA television deal when the Warner Bros. Discovery chief had a window to negotiate exclusively with the league. Instead, the NBA awarded the rights to carry its games to Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, NBCUniversal and Amazon’s Prime Video in deals totaling $77 billion.

Zaslav mitigated the damage. The company secured a carriage deal for its channels with Comcast, even though it won’t have pro basketball games on its TNT network starting with the 2025-26 season. The company also saved some face by agreeing to license “Inside the NBA” to ESPN as part of a settlement of its lawsuit against the league.

But there’s no doubt that the departure of the NBA is another black eye for a firm that doesn’t need any more negative headlines. The stock is down 8% so far this year, though it’s up from the midyear doldrums, when it was trading at around $7 a share. Perhaps that rebound, along with a high-profile restructuring announcement, will be enough to keep activist investors at bay for a while.

How the cable crumbles

This might have been the year the cable bundle reached the precipice that Disney’s Iger once talked about. Comcast Corp. announced a plan to spin off its basic cable channels (other than Bravo) into a separate company. Warner Bros. Discovery said it will restructure its business in a way that seemed to signal a future breakup.

This came after Warner and Paramount Global took a combined $15 billion in writedowns on their linear networks, basically admitting what was obvious: Cable channels have lost significant value. Cable and satellite packages have been losing subscribers to streaming for years. But for most legacy media conglomerates, they’re either too profitable or too ingrained with their other businesses to get rid of. ABC isn’t as valuable without ESPN, and vice versa.

The most intriguing question is what happens next to these cast-off cable channels. Fox Corp. has proven that there’s value in the right mix of traditional media assets. Most people think the Comcast spinoff is just the beginning of a larger roll-up of media networks, whether that includes the Warner/Discovery channels or Paramount’s deteriorating cable brands.

Passion projects and unwanted superheroes flop

There were plenty of box office bombs this year, but few caught the attention of the industry like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” and Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1.” Both were self-financed, grand-scale movies from movie business icons who are used to betting on themselves, and that’s pretty much where their similarities end.

Equally remarkable were the franchise-based movies that failed spectacularly, especially the superhero movies that apparently nobody wanted. Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux” stumbled with just $206 million, a stunning comedown for a musical sequel to a billion-dollar, Oscar-winning hit. And this one starred Lady Gaga. But it was clear from the early reviews from the movie’s Venice premiere that this wasn’t going to spur the cultural phenomenon the first one did.

Then there was Sony’s long-suffering effort to expand its Spider-Man-adjacent series of Marvel films. “Venom: The Last Dance” ended up doing decent business, thanks in part to international grosses. But “Madame Web” and “Kraven the Hunter” were both wipeouts. It turns out having a popular hero in a comic book movie helps.

Netflix breaks the internet (in a bad way)

Netflix may be the leader in subscription streaming video, but its first genuine professional live sports event — the much-hyped Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match — was a mess. First of all, the fight was just plain bad. It also was plagued with buffering and other video issues due to the number of people trying to watch.

Netflix spun it, saying that the technical issues were the result of so many people watching: 65 million households streaming concurrently and 120 million viewers tuning in, according to the company’s figures. And it is undeniably impressive how many people Netflix convinced to watch a YouTuber star punch a 58-year-old former heavyweight champ.

Analysts expect Netflix to work out the technical kinks for its two Christmas Day NFL games, and it’s certainly not backing off from its live sports ambitions. The company just signed a deal to stream the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031. But we’ll never get those hours back from Paul’s self-promotional machine.

Stuff we wrote

‘The Brutalist’ producers are betting on a 3.5-hour independent Adrien Brody film. A 3 ½-hour, character-driven film — complete with an intermission — might seem like a relic from the past. But that was part of the allure of “The Brutalist,” its makers say.

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto departs in cost-cutting move. Cavuto, the first anchor hired by Fox News in 1996, is another casualty of newfound frugality in the TV news business.

‘Politics is bad for business.’ Why Disney’s Bob Iger is trying to avoid hot buttons. Walt Disney Co. and its chief executive have made a sharp pivot since doubling down on diversity and inclusion efforts in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis 4½ years ago.

Cookie Monster, Big Bird and Elmo need new ‘Sesame Street’ address. HBO threw “Sesame Street” a lifeline a decade ago, enabling the production of new episodes. Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to stop financing first-run episodes after this season.

Finally ...

I’ve spent the last week absolutely rocking out to country-rocker MJ Lenderman’s “Manning Fireworks,” one of the best albums of the year. Dig it if you love anything in the Wilco/Son Volt universe. Here’s a sample.