The Second Decline of Hollywood

The 2020s began in crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic forced theatres to shutter worldwide in early 2020 and accelerated every tension that had been building in the industry for years. Studios released major films directly to streaming, theatrical windows shrank dramatically, and for a period it genuinely seemed possible that the theatrical experience might not fully recover. It did, partially. Films like Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Oppenheimer (2023) proved that audiences would still turn out in massive numbers for the right film on the big screen. But the landscape they returned to was a fundamentally altered one.

Streaming had permanently fragmented attention and appetite. The hunger for the next big franchise film was, for the first time, showing real signs of fatigue, and several high-profile superhero films underperformed in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Studios began pulling back, recalibrating, and searching again for what audiences actually wanted.

What the decade has already made clear is that the centre of creative gravity is genuinely global now in a way it has never been before. South Korean, Spanish, Indian, and Nigerian cinema are finding worldwide audiences with ease. The tools of filmmaking are more accessible than ever. And if the history of cinema has shown us anything, it's that when the old models collapse, something new and unexpected tends to grow in their place.