How Can Hollywood Thrive? Make 100 Movies a Year That People Want to See

You know what it’s like when you have a problem, or maybe a few of them, and they start to interlock and overwhelm you, and you’re frozen and can’t take action, until hope seems to be fading or maybe even lost, and then one day you wake up and realize…that you need therapy?

The movie industry needs therapy.

It needs a lot of things, of course, starting with hits and more hits. That’s the long and short of it, isn’t it? But considering that we still do have hits, as well as audiences who go out to movie theaters to create them, it’s worth asking why a healthier industry — one that generates more hits than it does now, with the consistency that happened in the ’90s and ’00s — is starting to feel so desperately out of reach.

This is where the therapy comes in. In your first sessions with a therapist, you tend to unload the problems that are weighing you down so much that they’ve come to seem insurmountable. In the case of the movie business, let’s run through the tape loop of Reasons for Doom that now plays in all our heads.

1. The pandemic changed the business, making people not want to go out to movie theaters. 2. Streaming, which crested during the pandemic, became the thing they were staying home for. 3. The movie theater experience sucks (cellphones, endless trailers, overpriced concessions), and the attempts to improve and “enhance” it haven’t fundamentally changed anything. 4. Young people don’t care about movies — they’d just as soon watch TikTok.

OK, OK, we know, we know. So maybe we should all just go home and crawl under the covers and stay there. But see, I think the solution is actually standing right in front of us.

Hundreds of movies get released every year, and the majority of them don’t do all that well. But a number of them do. Blockbuster culture, the cornerstone of the movie business for decades, is still alive and kicking, and, in certain ways, thriving. (Those…