Marc Andreessen on the State of Film and Hollywood

Movies as Modern Myths

• Marc Andreessen argues movies now play the role that myths and legends played in ancient cultures and novels played 100 years ago: they contain and make permanent the most important aspects of a civilization.
• He has enormous respect for anyone who makes a creative work, and notes many highly entertaining films (e.g., the John Wick movies) have been made in recent decades.
• Catherine suggests the '90s was the last decade when everyone watched the same movies and the Oscars indicated what everyone had to see; the audience has since fragmented.

What Happened to Hollywood

• 2019 was a peak year — Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 1917, Parasite — followed by a 'memory hole' of great films.
• COVID alone doesn't explain it: movies take four to five years from greenlight to release, so today's films were greenlit around 2020 and the shift began around 2015.
• Streaming first flooded Hollywood with money (Netflix spending ~$20 billion/year on content), then pulled back, and its cost-plus model cut off the after-market upside (DVDs, syndication) that once rewarded wildcatting.
• Hollywood was hit hard by 'the message' (the Critical Drinker's term) — political content that turned many potential great films into propaganda — plus a 'reign of terror' in which one misstep could destroy careers.

One Battle After Another

• Paul Thomas Anderson's film, based loosely on Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, is described as a 2022 time capsule that lands as musty today.
• It reportedly cost ~$200 million and is estimated to lose $100–120 million; critics are rapturous and it may sweep the Oscars.

Eddington

• Ari Aster's film is called the first capital-A art movie since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — the first film in which COVID, the George Floyd riots, social media, wokeness and Trump actually happened.
• Joaquin Phoenix plays a small-town New Mexico sheriff; Pedro Pascal plays a mayor resembling Gavin Newsom; Emma Stone plays an anxious wife drawn into online conspiracies.
• Andreessen hopes it begins a wave of films engaging real life, in the spirit of Tom Wolfe's advice to immerse yourself in what people are actually doing.

Signs of a Phase Shift

• The fever has broken: comedies are possible again, Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ sequel got greenlit, and the new Naked Gun and Fantastic Four show audiences responding to non-message content.
• Executives fear critics, radicalized young staff, boards and shareholders, but financial pressure means 'butts in seats' now matter more than reviews.
• AI (e.g., Sora) will enable a new kind of filmmaker with ideas but no camera, set or actors — echoing how digital camcorders enabled Matt Stone and Trey Parker's original South Park Christmas card in 1993.

Atlas Shrugged

• Ayn Rand's novel remains a bestseller that readers love and critics despise; Whittaker Chambers famously said it had 'the whiff of the gas chamber about it.'
• Andreessen says a faithful adaptation would be the ultimate test of Hollywood's new era — and suggests AI might ultimately make it possible.