They all thought they could launch their own streaming platforms, which only cannibalized the existing top dog Netflix. And none of the new ones were able to attract interest. You can now burn more money paying for these streaming services than you do for premium TV.
And now there is a lot of talk about the inevitable consolidation of the streaming services.
My fear is that the streamers will first swallow all the independent production studios and, at the same time, put the theaters out of business, with only scattered art house cinemas hanging on here and there. Then the streamers will consolidate. We will have a big three that dominates the entire supply chain.
The big three will continue to look for synergies and the next thing they will do is merge their DEI efforts under the guise of creating an industry standard for "inclusive" and "responsible" programming. And that will be that. The commissars will control the entire industry from production forward. Movies can still be made inexpensively. One of my favorites, Columbus (2017, Kogonada, with John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, who should have had an Oscar nomination) was made for $700,000. A Ghost Story (2017, A24/David Lowery, with Ben Affleck and Rooney Mara) was made for $100,000. Both are niche films, highly regarded by the critics (and with pretty high audience scores as well, but the audiences are highly self-selected; they're not everyone's cup of tea). But will such movies find distribution when the commissars decide that John Cho is the wrong kind of diversity to count, or that the ghosts are insufficiently diverse?
I'm not going to go hunting for them now, but there are some interesting lists of films made for next to nothing. And of course, people can now shoot films on an iPhone and edit them on home computers with pretty sophisticated software, and some of them are watchable. If you can get the actors to work for virtually nothing and have a producer/writer/director/editor doing the heavy lifting, it can be done. But where will such films get distribution if they don't pass the DEI gauntlet at the beginning? For now, there is the option of samizdat distribution over the internet, but the chances of breaking out to broad viewership are pretty slim. And the Borg will try to swallow everything on the internet as well.
This goes way beyond cheering for movies, directors or actors you might want to see. The big issue is the totalitarian push to completely control all content across all platforms so that the propaganda web is seamless. We're not there yet, but we're on the slippery slope.
We need to preserve a diverse ecosystem for production and distribution. It's not clear that we can.