There are also greedy unions, and IMHO, union busting is as important as trustbusting if the movie business is going to have a chance to recover. The unions have their beady little eyes fixed on the passive revenue flow from streaming, which caters to the lowest common denominator, couch potato, channel surfing audience -- as opposed to active consumers who actually make an investment of time and the price of a ticket to go watch a movie. But put that aside for now.
The "Big Eight" calling the shots for AMPTP -- the "class A members" are Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBC Universal(owned by Comcast), Netflix, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. Discovery. These have bought up most of the formerly independent legacy studios. The other 350 or so members of AMPTP own most of the rest.
Netflix is the streaming industry leader and has started to become a big player in origination and production, as opposed to just licensing material from other companies, which is where it started. How long it can stay healthy with a deep pocketed corporate owner remains to be seen, but it is still an independent player entirely invested in movies and tv shows.
Disney has diversified revenue from the parks and merchandise businesses, but Disney is the wokest of the woke crowd and is getting hammered on all fronts. It is regularly rumored as a potential takeover target.
Paramount is for sale.
WarnerMedia was dumped by AT&T in 2022 and lost its sugar daddy. It was shoved into a shotgun wedding with Discovery, the king of junk tv, with the Discovery people running the ship. I'm not a financial analyst, but I get the impression from skimming the news that most analysts think WarnerDiscovery is in serious trouble. It's massively indebted, and David Zaslav is slashing costs. There is a lot of trash to be slashed, but Zaslav is a Discovery guy, and quality may not be the priority. Warner is big enough to have a lot of fight left. It has a grand history and a deep catalogue. It scored with Barbie last year (I've not seen it; freeper reactions?), and I'm willing to bet that Dune II will be the biggest box office draw of 2024 (which is going to be a very grim year because the strikes gutted the pipeline). But no one would be surprised to see WarnerBros Discovery sold, merged, split up, whatever. Organizationally, it's been struggling for years, trying to find a viable strategy.
That leaves Amazon, Apple, Comcast/NBC Universal, and Sony -- which is a conglomerate that could walk away from movie production tomorrow and never miss it. These four have the deepest pockets and are the likeliest survivors.
The movie industry is sick because too much of it is being run by companies for which movies are loss leaders in their battle for dominance in the PixelVerse Wars. Movie studios used to be run by people who were actually in the movie business, and for whom success or failure depended on the box office. That was a great reality check. It's largely gone.
A producer oligopoly vs. unions that want to act as gatekeepers to all positions on both sides of the camera ... tarantula vs. scorpion in a bottle, anyone?
If the tarantula and the spider kill each other, what is left? Foreign films, for one thing. And independents, for another.
A24 is not an AMPTP member. I don't know if it is the biggest non-AMPTP studio, but it is not yet part of the cartel. But it's not alone: Exasperated Producers Say It Louder: We’re Not the AMPTP
I'd love to see truly independent producers team with truly independent writers, directors, actors and non-union trades people.Let them band together and make truly independent movies. Let the AMPTP and the union hacks kill each other. Let the new players rent production studios, or go abroad if they need to. But they still need financing. They need viable, independent theaters, and they need to bring back a strong theatrical window to break the Borg's stranglehold on distribution.
And they need customers who will actually buy a ticket and go to a theater to watch a good movie, as opposed to settling for whatever Netflix or Amazon or Apple serves up to the couch potatoes.
Good movies are still being made, but the structure of the industry in the streaming era is stacked against quality and in favor of corporate conglomerates that live in fear of their DEI commissars. The structure is the problem.
The film industry needs to recover its independence and be run by people who are actually interested in making movies, whose financial success depends on making movies that people actually want to watch, and whose aspiration is to make truly great movies (rare in any era) that audiences embrace as well. Those kinds of people are still scattered throughout the film divisions of the Borg, but they are no longer the bosses. And it shows.
“Greedy” was sarcasm. Both are corrupt and deserve each other.