Right now there’s enough debt, toil and trouble afoot to upend the film and streaming industries twice over. Cineworld, owner of the nation’s number two multiplex chain Regal, flirts with bankruptcy amid its nearly $5 billion debt load. Warner Bros. Discovery has taken to cutting its perceived staff and programming expendables. Nearly 200 episodes of “Sesame Street” yanked off HBO Max? Even with a merger debt load of $53 billion to $55 billion, somebody needs to put down the ducky and rethink that one.
This fall shapes up as a battle of reality vs. fantasy. The reality is a business that continues to unlearn lessons never easily learned in Hollywood: how to create and simultaneously point stockholders toward new work, new intellectual properties, new storytelling for a sustainable future.
The fantasy part, the creative part: That’s what may just get us through.
