Here’s media titan Barry Diller being all doom and gloom when forecasting Hollywood’s future, that is, if the writers and actors’ strikes are not resolved soon.
Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday, Diller — who previously served as CEO for Paramount and 20th Century Fox — believes the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes are a “perfect storm” of an apocalyptic nature.
You had Covid, which sent people home to watch streaming television and killed theaters. You’ve had the results of huge investments in streaming which have produced all these losses for all these companies that are now kind of retrenching. So at this moment, it’s kind of a perfect storm.
Diller believes that if a settlement is not reached by the September 1st deadline then it could spell the end of the Hollywood machine, as we know it:
“Who cares about Hollywood? Who cares about it? But the truth is, this is a huge business! Both domestically and for world exporters. … But these conditions will potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.
Diller is referencing to the audiences total disinterest in Hollywood infighting for more money. On the surface, both studios and strikers look out of touch to the mainstream public, which has already souring on movies as a whole — as you can attest by this summer’s epidemic of “flopbusters.”
Diller believes that there won’t be a deal reached by the fall and he blames numerous things for that. It doesn’t help that Disney CEO Bob Iger decided yo publicly call the demands from actors and writers “disturbing.” Iger’s current annual salary is a measly $195 million …
“Everybody’s probably overpaid at the top end,” Diller said. “The one idea I had is to say, as a good faith measure, both the executives and the most-paid actors should take a 25 percent pay cut to try and narrow the difference between those who get highly paid and those that don’t.”
Yeah, that ain’t happening.
Diller’s comments come after Nicolas Winding Refn’s dire outlook of the strike (via IndieWire). The Danish auteur admitted to being “all for” the cleansing of the industry — “Burn it all down to make it emerge again,” he said.
