In 2025, Hollywood faced something of an existential crisis — and that was before the news that Netflix was attempting to purchase Warner Bros., one of the movie industry’s most storied studios.
Box office sales have flagged since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and they have recently suffered the worst October in decades, excluding only 2020. Much of Hollywood’s malaise is the result of competition. Video games, YouTube, TikTok and other inexpensive, convenient and easily accessible forms of new media are eating into people’s time, providing the sort of confectionlike entertainment to the masses that Hollywood used to in its glory days.
Some of those forms of entertainment are already bigger than Hollywood, commanding more of the economy and more hours of attention than anything the old studios produce. YouTube is an attention behemoth, and the video game industry is much larger than traditional Hollywood.
But what none of those new mediums have yet demonstrated is Hollywood’s special ability, the cultural power that has sustained it through so many crises: Hollywood is Hollywood because of its gift for mythmaking, and in particular for a kind of American mythmaking that transformed our postwar decades, both the tumult and the triumphs, into something more than an economic success story.
Hollywood gave us and the world the American legend, highbrow and low. That’s Hollywood’s magic — and that is what the creators of these stories, whoever they are, must remember.
Myths are the engine of any culture, even one as disparate and diverse as America. And in the postwar era Hollywood was in the business of affirming the story of America and selling that story back to its citizens. America rose with Hollywood, as Hollywood served as a sort of marketing and communications department for the American idea in all its fractured glory. It’s probably not an accident that one of America’s most prominent export industries, technology, is seeking storytellers to sell the industry’s myths and legends to the world.
Mythic power is the capacity to produce common reference points that go beyond hours viewed and dollars spent. It’s hard to imagine a politician casually referring to even the most famous video game moments. But no one blinks when a governor ranks his favorite “Star Wars” movies. Memes are the slang of the internet, yet many simply remix and recycle frames from old films. Hollywood is unmatched in its capacity to create mass cultural shorthand.
When Hollywood has excelled in the postpandemic landscape, it’s often been in those instances in which it has returned to ambitious mythmaking spectacle. Think of the high-flying glory of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the scientific triumph and nuclear terror of “Oppenheimer” or “Barbie,” all of which successfully offered big-screen mythology about American power and culture.
This sort of ambition used to be common even in smaller films: A movie like “Point Break,” from the eventual Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow, wasn’t just a rousing surfer action picture; it was also a sweeping take on a particularly American form of masculine risk-taking.
By contrast, Ms. Bigelow’s most recent film, “A House of Dynamite,” is a polished, nuclear terror nail-biter that was made for Netflix. It got a brief theatrical release, but it feels smaller and less ambitious as a national story to reckon with as a result.
The size of the screen isn’t all that matters; many of today’s movie junkies got their cinematic education by watching films on low-quality VHS tapes. But the presumption of a big screen and a big audience encouraged ambitious, crowd-pleasing work, giving even pulp-oriented filmmakers something to aim for.
From “Cleopatra” to “Saving Private Ryan” to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Hollywood’s deepest power is in larger-than-life legends, in the sense of awe and wonder at the sometimes terrifying, sometimes thrilling spectacle of human existence.
So far, despite their economic successes, none of Hollywood’s competitors have figured out how to fully tap that power for themselves. Which may be why video game companies with revenues that would be the envy of studio chiefs have come calling to Tinseltown, looking to bring their own myths to the big screen.
In some cases it’s the other way around, with business-minded film executives seeking out games as new mines of exploitable intellectual property. The benefits go both ways: A successful big-screen treatment can penetrate the cultural consciousness like few, if any, video games or YouTube channels.
Too many of today’s stars and movies, in contrast, feel small, comfortable, cozy, down to earth. The stars are relatable and accessible, appearing in commercials and on influencer interview shows. They are not legends but mortals, reduced to Zoom-like boxes on small screens. The films, meanwhile, are comfortable retreads. Outside of a small handful of tent-pole projects, movies have lost the ambition to show us something truly new.
Netflix straddles a contradiction. Some of its awards-bait feature films are genuinely impressive, especially when big-name filmmakers are involved: Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” David Fincher’s “Mank.” This year, Guillermo del Toro took a big swing with “Frankenstein.”
But too much of Netflix’s output seems designed to be watched while folding laundry. There’s an infamous note some Netflix writers supposedly got about how scripts need to have characters narrate their decisions in order to make things clear to viewers who are looking at their phones or otherwise distracted.
Hollywood’s greatest mythmakers want to command your full attention. Netflix’s co-founder has said that the streamer’s biggest competition is sleep. Hollywood’s mythmakers are competing with your wildest dreams.
Think of someone like the writer and director James Cameron. Mr. Cameron has already delivered one of the biggest postpandemic hits with “Avatar: The Way of Water” (and “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the third film in the series, opened last week). The futuristic “Avatar” films don’t deal directly with Americana, but they can be understood as revisionist Westerns in which the natives — in this case, tall, blue aliens — are on the side of right.
Today’s computer-generated effects are often expensive and garish. Mr. Cameron, in contrast, has long been determined to push the envelope of cinematic technology in order to astound. Despite a string of billion-dollar hits, even he has suggested that the first “Avatar,” an original film with a gargantuan budget, might not be made today.
It’s no surprise that Mr. Cameron is considering making something for the Sphere in Las Vegas. This might seem like a gimmick, but the Sphere’s impossibly large screen is, if nothing else, about as American a cinematic techno-marvel as you can imagine.
Then there is Christopher Nolan. He has pursued awe and scale through innovative uses of IMAX film and projection. Almost alone among directors who came to prominence this century, he seems cleareyed not only about Hollywood’s capacity for grandiose mythmaking, but also about its necessity for the continuance of the art form.
Tellingly, his next film is about one of humanity’s most enduring myths, an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The movie isn’t due in theaters until summer 2026, but early sales of 70-mm. IMAX screenings — the giant analog tech that is the filmmaker’s preferred format — have already sold out.
Mr. Nolan is making an epic, in every sense. Hollywood needs more of them.
Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) is the features editor at Reason and a host of the podcast “Across the Movie Aisle.”
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