From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.

As 2024 comes to an end, we want to thank you, our listeners.

We ask you to send us your burning questions about the industry,

and you delivered from around the world.

Will we answer your question in our first ever listener mailbag?

Stay with us to find out.

I am joined, as always, by my partner in banter and in work, Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt. Hi there. So the listener mailbag,

this will be a fun one. I am going to apologize in advance if I'm mispronouncing anyone's name,

doing my best. But we're going to start with a question from Sashen.

And the question is, with all the chaos and turbulence in the industry's economics

and the current contraction, will creatives in the U.S. have to come to terms with the fact

that the industry will never be as lucrative as it was, like with residual payments on linear TV?

And if so, do you think public funding will play a bigger role as it does in other countries, especially for filmmakers?

I would say that the industry, as we knew it, will probably not ever be as profitable as it was.

It will morph and change, and technologies will morph and change, and maybe people will morph and change.

But it seems like it's going to survive, but not at least for the foreseeable future,

it's not the crazy fun gambling game that people played for many years and some of them made a lot of money.

As for public funding, I think that is not a thing in the United States.

Matt, what do you think?

Well, I think you're right that the appetite for public funding at the federal level is actually going down rather than up.

You know, states do subsidize productions via tax credits, and that does not seem to be going away.

In fact, there's a big effort in California right now to increase the number of tax credits

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