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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson
Episode: The Future of Entertainment, Part 1: Is Hollywood's Business Model Broken?
Description: 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 abou...