HOLLYWOOD GOES BUST

LOS ANGELES. – Michael Fortin was at the heart of Hollywood’s golden age of streaming.

The actor and aerial cinematographer turned his hobby of flying drones into a profitable business in 2012 just as the streaming wars were taking off.

For a decade, he was flying high above film sets, creating sleek aerial shots for movies and TV shows on Netflix, Amazon and Disney.

Now he’s on the verge of becoming homeless – again.

He was evicted from the Huntington Beach home he shared with his wife and two young children and now is being booted from the Las Vegas apartment they moved to because they could no longer afford to live in Southern California.

“We were saving to buy a house, we had money, we had done things the right way,” he says. “Two years ago, I didn’t worry about going out to dinner with my wife and kids and spending 200 bucks.”

“Now I worry about going out and spending $5 on a value meal at McDonald’s.”

For over a decade, business was booming in Hollywood, with studios battling to catch up to new companies like Netflix and Hulu.

But the good times ground to a halt in May 2023, when Hollywood’s writers went on strike.

The strikes lasted multiple months and marked the first time since the 1960s that both writers and actors joined forces – effectively shutting down Hollywood production.

But rather than roaring back, in the one year since the strikes ended, production has fizzled.

Projects have been cancelled and production was cut across the city as jobs have dried up, with layoffs at many studios – most recently at Paramount.

It had a second round of layoffs this week, as the storied movie company moves to cut 15% of its workforce ahead of a merger with the production company Skydance.

Unemployment in film and TV in the United States was at 12.5% in August, but many think those numbers are actually much higher, because many film workers either do not file for unemployment benefits because they’re not eligible or they’ve exhausted those benefits after months of not working.

As a whole, the number of US productions during the second quarter of 2024 was down about 40% compared to the same period in 2022. Globally, there was a 20% decline over that period, according to ProdPro, which tracks TV and film productions.

That means fewer new movies and binge-worthy shows for us.

But experts say the streaming boom wasn’t sustainable.

And studios are trying to figure out how to be profitable in a new world when people don’t pay for cable TV funded by commercials. – BBC