Hollywood

Hollywood's initial response to television was contemptuous and then desperate. Studios refused to license their film libraries to television networks and forbade contract stars from appearing on the new medium. The strategy held for a few years and then collapsed: the studios needed revenue, television needed content, and the economics of licensing old films proved irresistible. By the mid-1950s, pre-1948 film libraries were being sold to television distributors, and the barrier between the two industries had effectively dissolved.

What replaced the studio model was a more fragmented industry built around individual productions. Stars and directors moved from contract employees to independent agents negotiating deal by deal. Talent agencies William Morris, later Creative Artists Agency — accumulated the leverage that studios had previously held. A film was now assembled project by project: producer acquires script, attaches star, packages deal with studio for financing and distribution. The studio provided money and infrastructure; creative control shifted toward the talent.

In 1967, two films announced that the old rules had changed. Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn, was violent, morally ambiguous, and critically divisive. The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols, was ironic about the aspirations its audience had been raised to hold. Both were enormous commercial successes. Studio executives, many of whom had condemned both films before their releases, began looking for directors who could make that kind of picture.

What followed is usually called New Hollywood or the American New Wave roughly a decade, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, in which a generation of directors trained on European art cinema and American genre films gained unusual creative authority over their projects. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin: their films were personal, formally adventurous, often downbeat, and frequently successful enough to justify the studios' continued investment. The Godfather in 1972 and Chinatown in 1974 demonstrated that serious, morally complex filmmaking could also be commercially serious.

Streaming is doing to the blockbuster era what television did to the classical studio system: it is changing where audiences watch, how much they pay, and consequently what kind of films studios are willing to finance. Netflix spent roughly $17 billion on content in 2023. The theatrical window the period during which a film plays exclusively in cinemas before becoming available on other platforms has compressed from six months to as little as 45 days for many releases. The economics that justified mid-budget dramas and comedies for theatrical release have largely dissolved; those films now go directly to streaming.

What remains in theaters, predominantly, is the franchise film: sequels, prequels, superhero pictures, and animated features with established audiences. This is not entirely new the blockbuster era already privileged franchise properties but the concentration has intensified. The films that studios commit to theatrical release are increasingly the films with the lowest narrative risk and the broadest possible audience. Everything else migrates to streaming, where success is measured in watch hours rather than ticket sales, and where the metrics are proprietary and largely invisible.

The films of 1939 were made by a system that, within fifteen years, would be legally dismantled and economically transformed. Gone with the Wind was re-released in 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, and 1989. The film outlasted the studio that produced it, the contract system that staffed it, and the theater chains that first distributed it. Hollywood's output, at its best, has always proved more durable than the industrial apparatus that generated it.