Hello and welcome back to the bunker with me Andrew Harrison. We cover politics on the bunker but everything is political especially culture and something is going terribly wrong with the engine of American

and thus the world's popular culture. The movie industry is shrinking, its revenue is down, the volume of its releases is down,

and worst of all, the surprised and creative bravery is leaching out of a business that used to

prosper by capturing the global imagination. Fewer major

studios are making fewer movies and if the ones that do come out, a parade of Jurassic parks,

King Kong's Fast and Furiouses and ever more minor marvel properties seem repetitive and predictable.

That's because overextended studios are playing it safe, with supposedly dependable intellectual

property that just feels old and stale.

There are still inspiring blockbusters like Dune Part 2.

Two of the three biggest movies of 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer booked the trend by leading with bold ideas.

But sandwiched between the two was the Super Mario Brothers movie.

Overall, the sense from the studios is that nothing works anymore and they don't know why.

And home streaming is not making up the difference.

Netflix seems to have come through the streaming was

against competitors like Amazon and Apple intact,

but with less creative boldness

and a much reduced slate of original shows it used to

make 80 plus movies a year and will now release only 20 to 30. So Hollywood has

suffered downturns before but now a combination of slow recoveries from both COVID and the

writer strike, plus new studio owners ever more relentless concentration on the bottom line,

seemed to be driving it towards a more serious state.

Earlier this year, the historian of pop culture, Daniel Bessner

...