The Future of Entertainment, Part 1: Is Hollywood's Business Model Broken?

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The film and TV business has quietly—or, if you work in the industry, not so quietly—been in a depression for the past few years. Original TV work has plummeted. In 2024, Americans bought about 40 percent fewer movie tickets than they did in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The number of people employed in the motion picture industry in L.A. County has also declined by 40 percent. Those are catastrophic figures. Few people have done more to shape my understanding of these developments than Ben Fritz, an entertainment industry reporter at The Wall Street Journal. We talk about what’s happened to the TV and film business in the past few years. What would it take to reverse this trend? And why are some people seeing this reversal as a positive sign for high-quality filmmaking? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ben Fritz Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	What's up? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay Show at the Ringer and Spotify.
0:04.7	We're building this thing up and I couldn't be more excited to be back talking college football
0:09.6	and everything NFL draft with the most informed audience out there. That's you.
0:15.1	My co-host, Steve Mention, I will be with you three times a week throughout the football season
0:19.8	with all the latest news, analysis,
0:22.0	and scouting intel from around the league. For even more insight, subscribe to my newsletter,
0:27.8	the McShea report to access my mock drafts, big boards, tape breakdowns, and other exclusive
0:34.0	scouting content you can't get anywhere else. It's going to be a great season. And I hope
0:39.9	you'll be with us at the McShay show every step of the way. Hello, everyone. This is the first
0:46.3	of a two-part series on the future of entertainment, focusing on two capitals of media. Today,
0:52.5	Hollywood, film and TV, and Los Angeles. On Tuesday, we'll talk
0:56.6	about Broadway, theater, and New York. In the last few weeks, I've been interested in
1:01.7	several trends that I've seen unfolding in film and TV. And before we introduce today's guest,
1:07.2	I want to go through them so that you can see what I'm looking at. The 2010s were not
1:12.8	quite a golden age for the business of Hollywood, but they were a golden age of certainty.
1:19.0	The film and TV business knew what worked, and they knew what growth looked like. For film,
1:24.8	the franchise model was running at full blast, with properties like Marvel and Fast
1:29.2	the Furious doing crazy numbers with worldwide audiences.
1:32.9	At the same time, the TV industry was moving rapidly to online streaming, where Netflix
1:38.0	and HBO and Amazon Prime and others poured billions of dollars into original shows with
1:43.4	little care for profit at a time when
1:45.7	interest rates were low and investors valued subscriber growth over operating income. That era is over.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Ringer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Ringer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.