“Given the tenor of recent press coverage of the industry, this may seem hard to believe,” the WGA Negotiations Committee said in a message to guild members. “Stories about business model uncertainty, company layoffs and the industry’s impending downturn are both standard refrains during union contract negotiation cycles and the predictable result of Wall Street’s narrow focus on stock price and short-term profits.
Released today, the WGA’s State of the Industry report examines “the entertainment industry’s profitable past, present, and future, where writers’ content will continue to generate billions of dollars.” See the full report“Over the decades, entertainment has been a highly profitable business, weathering periodic downturns but consistently rebounding,” the report says.
“Faced with this picture, analysts and the mainstream press continue their nervous coverage of the entertainment business, reflecting the reality that even when industry profits are high, Wall Street demands that those profits continually grow. The unexpected boom in pandemic-fueled subscriber sign-ups fostered Wall Street’s expectations, and several companies’ stock prices benefited. Once the pandemic surge in subscriptions plateaued, Wall Street enthusiasm cooled.
“Internationally, by exporting television networks or licensing television programming to foreign networks, the media companies generated $15 billion in annual revenue by 2013. They even diversified revenues for broadcast networks by making cable providers pay retransmission fees; what was a virtually non-existent revenue stream in 2000 reached $6.5 billion in 2015 and more than $14 billion dollars in 2022.
I thought movies almost always lose money? At least on paper…