Let me tell you about a meeting I had in 2018 with the CTO of a major Hollywood studio. I had come to talk about data, forecasting, decision tools — the kind of infrastructure that was already standard practice in finance, retail and aviation. His response stopped me cold. “You have to understand something,” he said. “Around here, more transparency means more accountability. More accountability means people are afraid to get fired. So nobody wants more transparency.”
That conversation has stayed with me. Not because it was surprising — by then I had heard variations of it across the industry — but because it was so precisely the diagnosis of what was wrong.
And what was wrong has now become a crisis.
In 2025, the entertainment industry shed over 17,000 jobs — an 18% increase in layoffs from the year before. Paramount eliminated 2,000 positions, roughly 10% of its entire workforce. Across the industry, a wave of mergers and acquisitions has reshaped the studio landscape, as legacy players scramble to find the scale and efficiency that organic growth alone can no longer deliver. Netflix is now worth more than twice as much as Walt Disney and more than four times the value of Comcast.
The industry’s instinct is to frame this as a technology story: streaming disrupted distribution, algorithms disrupted taste-making or Silicon Valley disrupted Hollywood. But that framing lets the studios off the hook. The disruption was enabled from within, by a culture that actively resisted the kind of business intelligence that would have allowed the industry to see it coming and respond.
—
Here is what is easy to forget: Hollywood has always been at the frontier of technology. The transition from silent film to sound. From black and white to color. From practical effects to CGI. From film stock to digital. Every generation of storytelling technology has been embraced on the creative side with extraordinary speed and sophistication. The tools that filmmakers use today would be unrecognizable to a director from 1990 – and that is exactly as it should be.
But walk into the business side of most studios, production companies or sales agencies, and you will find work processes that would be largely familiar to someone from 1995. Scripts evaluated on paper and memory. Financial models built in spreadsheets and revised by hand. International revenue projections derived from gut instinct and relationship history. Development decisions made in rooms where the most sophisticated analytical tool is a whiteboard.
The excuse has always been that the business of entertainment is too creative, too human and too intuitive to be reduced to data. But this was never the argument – it was the rationalization. The real driver was the culture that CTO described to me in 2018: a culture where transparency felt threatening, where surfacing information was interpreted as an invitation to accountability, and where the status quo was safer than innovation.
The consequences were predictable, and they arrived. By 2019, all 19 of the top 20 domestic box office films were sequels, prequels, remakes, or adaptations of existing IP. Not because that was what audiences fundamentally wanted, but because, without rigorous analytical tools to evaluate original ideas, studios defaulted to the one signal that felt safe: prior performance. The result was an industry that had optimized for risk reduction at the expense of creative ambition – and audiences, after years of franchise fatigue, began to disengage accordingly.
—
We are competing, in 2026, for the most contested resource in human history: attention.
The average person now has access to more entertainment options than at any point in human civilization. Professional sports streaming live on every device. Social media platforms delivering an infinite, algorithmically personalized content feed. Video games of cinematic scale and complexity. Podcasts, live events, user-generated video. The idea that a film or television series competes only against other films and television series is dangerously outdated. We are competing against everything.
And the financial reality of that competition is severe. Production costs have risen dramatically. Marketing costs have risen further. The economics that made Hollywood a reliable wealth-generation machine for the better part of a century have fundamentally changed. The studios that survive will be the ones that make better decisions, faster, with more information.
This is not a technology argument. It is a business argument. And the analogy I keep returning to is navigation.
In 1990, if you were driving somewhere unfamiliar, you used a paper map. You planned your route, hoped for the best, and found out about the accident when you hit the traffic. Today, you use Google Maps or Waze. Your route updates in real time. Obstacles are flagged before you reach them. The destination is the same, but the quality of information transforms the reliability of the journey.
No one argues that GPS has made driving less creative. It has simply made the journey more reliable and the decisions along the way better informed.
This is what decision intelligence means for the film business. Not replacing the creative judgment of producers, executives and filmmakers. Augmenting it, giving the people who make consequential decisions access to the best available information at the moment it matters.
—
The tools exist. Predictive financial models can now forecast a film’s box office and ancillary revenue potential across 80 international territories in seconds from development stage, before a single dollar of production budget is committed. Real-time scenario planning allows an executive to test alternative configurations, release strategies, and format decisions in minutes rather than weeks. The industry has always had a submission problem disguised as a taste problem. AI-powered screenplay coverage can summarize hundreds of scripts in the time it previously took to read a handful, meaning fewer good ideas go unread simply because there weren’t enough hours in the day. Social sentiment tools can measure audience reaction to a trailer within hours of its release and recommend specific marketing adjustments before the campaign has spent its budget.
None of these tools make a creative decision. They inform it. They give executives considering an original screenplay the same quality of financial intelligence that was previously reserved for sequels with proven performance histories – and in doing so, they make it possible to take better creative risks, not fewer. Original ideas don’t fail because they are original. They fail because the industry has lacked the tools to evaluate them rigorously and back them with appropriate confidence.
The studios and distributors that are thriving in this environment are not the ones that have reduced headcount and consolidated libraries. They are the ones that have invested in the intelligence infrastructure to make every decision count. Netflix’s operating margin reached 29.5 percent in 2025. The legacy studios, restructuring and merging in search of scale, are still searching for a path to sustainable profitability.
—
I remain genuinely optimistic about this industry. Not despite the current turbulence, but because of what lies on the other side of it.
The talent has never been better. The global appetite for high-quality storytelling has never been higher. The technology to support both the creative and business dimensions of filmmaking has never been more capable. The only thing standing between where we are and where we could be is the organizational courage to adopt it.
Hollywood transformed itself from silent film to sound not because it was forced to, but because it recognized that technology in service of storytelling made the stories better. The same transformation is available now – not on the production side, where the industry has always moved quickly, but on the business side, where it has moved too slowly for too long.
The paper map had its virtues. But nobody is going back to it.
Tobias Queisser is Co-Founder and CEO of The Cinelytic Group, the leading provider of decision intelligence solutions for the Film & TV industry. He brings deep expertise across finance, technology, and entertainment. Prior to founding The Cinelytic Group, Tobias spent a decade in investment banking at Ermgassen & Co., advising clients on complex international M&A transactions. He subsequently co-founded and managed a global investment fund based in London, which was successfully acquired in 2013. He later founded Arctic Pictures Limited, an international film production company, and co-founded Cosmo Media Labs, an innovative studio specializing in TV shows, games, and Web3-based brand experiences.
Tobias holds an MSc in International Accounting & Finance from Cass Business School, London, and a BA (Hons) from the European Business School, London. He has also studied Film Finance & Production at UCLA and Film Production & Production Management at the National Film and Television School, London.
The post Hollywood’s Real Disruption Problem Isn’t Netflix. It’s a Fear of Data | Guest Column appeared first on TheWrap.
