by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
This Hollywood Housekeeping after a blockbuster Summer in 2026 begins with a passing comment. An Oscar nom recently mentioned the empty buildings in West Hollywood, how Hollywood has “lost its middle class jobs, you used to be able to work and support a family.” How the whole vibe reminds him of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” a British class-war show circa the 1970’s.
This Nominee, who shall remain nameless, spells out the writing on the wall for Downstairs, or Below The Line, and doesn’t even indict Upstairs (Above The Line). You know why? Because everyone, even upstairs in Hollywood, keeps asking the same thing day after day… “is Hollywood DOA? Has LA production lost to Budapest and Vancouver forever?”
When I point out that “Black Dahlia” (2006), a quintessential LA noir being shot in Bulgaria, was the first production exodus from Hollywood that shocked me; he has his own horror story.
It’s more current, a big picture you’d recognize, “that was like shooting LA Confidential in Budapest.”
We both pause.
As in, is there a timeline or some clear data point, when the studios decided to go big tent-pole only?
You want to blame Bob Iger at Disney, because it sounds like a mouse-house idea to maximize profit? As in: who needs another free-thinking VW Herbie fully loaded about people, when you can have an animated critter lead a furry friendly franchise?
Spielberg warned everybody about Hollywood relying on these monster box-office raking franchises, right? Even in 1997, the man who invented the Summer Blockbuster on June 20, 1975 with JAWS, warned that if a few giant tentpoles collapsed, so would the Town, right?
The other Steven, Steven Soderbergh has vehemently backed up the Box Office King’s dire warning. From his own experience, no less, in 2025 with a shoulda-been hit movie made for adults, about adults, by a famous screenwriter.
When Soderbergh’s grown-up sophisticated thriller Black Bag, had an epic miss at the box office by April 2025, Soderbergh didn’t blame himself. He blamed a trend. Young people and their YouTube slash Influencers lives and short attention spans were emptying seats at the theaters. You wonder if this is why Netflix is losing on the NASDAQ to YouTube, short form is punishing movies and pushing the two-hour wide release off a cliff?
Back to Soderbergh’s 2025 bellwether movie.
The script was written by Jurassic Park penner David Koepp who is a guaranteed seat-filler; Black Bag starred Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, ffs. How could it fail?
And yet it tanked at the box office. By all accounts, and accountants, friendly or unfriendly. Tanked.
Thus Soderbergh told DEADLINE about what he considered a “Dead Zone” for human-touch, star-driven, mid-range movies. His argument touches on the tent poles of a bigger monster eating Hollywood from the inside.
Thus here’s where our headline comes in: Big Bang BO vs Soderbergh’s Dead Zone.
Look at the insane rise of Billion-dollar BO totals ramping up to a fever pitch over the years?
Shocking when you chart it. Did they, The Powers That Be (TPTB) collude to squeeze out those mid-range movies, was it roadkill on the freeway to profitability at Box Office? Could TPTB have decided production is moving out of LA permanently?
Even if David Ellison merges Paramount and Warner Bros, has Hollywood lost its dominance in the marketplace?
Is there still a Dream Factory?
Spielberg basically saw the 2013 pivot to big tent-pole pictures, saw the sudden bloat of these campy super-super movies, and realized living on shark meat is unsustainable. That was a JAWS joke, but he has been ringing alarm bells for years.
We can chart his perspicacity on this particular aspect of the business, and others, to drive the point home.
Did Hollywood executives know that the move away from smaller and mid-sized movies would kill all the Middle Class jobs in Hollywood and gut the production infrastructure?
But what about those tax incentives, right? This will bring production back to Hollywood, revive LA?
You can see how useless a tax incentive is, when you’ve broken the very machinery and people in it who make movies and filmed content in this Town?
What about the strikes, COVID, specifically the Writer’s Strike, since everyone likes to blame the writers?
Okay, own goal, true. But wiping out the Hollywood production infrastructure and sucking the lifeblood out of the working Middle Class in this Town? Perhaps it was a bloodless crime, or just a stacked pile of little decisions on how to run a studio that accidentally snuffed out all the viable crew and staff jobs in Hollywood?
Let’s look at the box office totals, because unlike anyone who ever showed up in a pitch meeting, numbers don’t lie. Or, if they lie, someone is fudging the ledger.
So, consider the last 25 or so years.
Meanwhile mid-range and smaller movies with human touch or human interest plots shrink and wither.
The chart shows the acceleration clearly: only two summer champions from 2000–2009 crossed $1 billion worldwide, compared with seven from 2010–2019.
For example, Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) cost $125 million to make (according to public records) and grossed $546 million worldwide. Banner opening day, banner weekend totals, right? Flash forward to 2022 when Tom Cruise will be given Hero Status again, after the MI franchise winners, with Top Gun: Maverick, which “saves” Hollywood from collapsing with empty pockets.
Anyway, by the 2010s, every Summer money-winner routinely carried a $150–$220 million production budget, while billion-dollar worldwide grosses were almost demanded by studio heads. Maybe even required.
Then COVID disrupts the graph, turns moviegoing upside-down. Tenet ($365 million worldwide) and Black Widow ($380 million) revive the 2020–21 theatrical fainting spell, before Top Gun: Maverick rebounds to $1.5 billion in 2022. Hence the rallying cry (and end of alienated affection) for Tom Cruise, Hollywood Box Office Hero.
Next Barbie turned roughly $145 million into $1.45 billion, while 2025’s Lilo & Stitch turned roughly $100 million into $1.04 billion. Big paydays, family driven, with Moms leading.
Across the full chart, the summer blockbuster evolves from the half-billion-dollar hit into the billion-dollar global phenom —with the Pandemic being the only hiccup, a sad one granted, in that 25-year rocket-ride.
Let’s face it, we know somebody pulled the trigger on adult-middle range human interest movies, and we should be upset about it.
Not just because it was the undoing of the working Middle Class in Hollywood, who are now the barely working poor, not even kidding. But because the movies that nourish a sense of unity and community in this country and the world, are gone now.
Don’t blame the Guilds, Unions, picket lines, or knife-fights for fair pay from the Studios… follow the money. Who doesn’t have to worry about the cost of bread at Sprouts or whether they now have to forego expensive organic produce at the Farmer’s Market for Ralph’s?
Wish we could go back to 2012, a perfect year for Human Movies: Lincoln, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty for which the first woman in the 100+ year of Hollywood would win a Best Director Oscar.
Those were the days, even though Argo should not have beaten Silver Linings Playbook, which had 8 Oscar noms and lost Best Picture to the Ben Affleck pet project.
Back then all these movies were for adults, grown-ups, before Big Tentpoles ate their lunch and threw up a new stark unmanned landscape in Hollywood.
What’s your opinion? Leave a comment below… this is part of an ongoing discussion about Hollywood.
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