By Gavin Boyle
Hollywood set the cultural tone for decades, but with the rise of social media, it lost this privilege and doesn’t seem like it will ever reclaim that role.
“The magic of TikTok…is that you’re scrolling on your For You page and suddenly you have like all these different things, and then you have a scene from a movie or TV show that immediately catches your attention because they cut the scenes in a sense that will immediately get the audience’s attention…as they’re scrolling,” veteran Hollywood writer Lara Rosales told Fox News.
“They’re edited so well to get the audience to watch them, but also, because again the themes continue to resonate even with younger generations. And I feel like a lot of the way in which TV was made and how it was edited a few years back was probably more like storytelling and not just flashes of advertisements of watch this and watch that,” she added.
While these kinds of edits are part of the vicious circle that’s lead to shorter attention spans and Hollywood’s struggle to regain its foothold in culture, Hollywood is also to blame for creating this problem in the first place.
Even before social media came onto the scene, the entertainment industry flooded audiences with a never ending slew of content. To stand out, productions had to go big and do something unique to pull the audience’s attention. At best, this meant creating a uniquely good story, but oftentimes it resulted in some sort of stunt to stand out from the noise.
Social media gives the everyday person a chance to do the same, and they have figured out how to do it better than Hollywood. For the most part, though, social media stars are not famous because of their storytelling. Jimmy Donaldson – aka. MrBeast –, for example, gets millions of views on his videos because they are extravagant and often feature unbelievable amounts of money, though they aren’t telling a Hollywood-level story.
To make matters worse, in the past decade, Hollywood has focused more on agenda-based movies than story-based productions. Disney, for example, has shoehorned liberal ideologies into so many of its productions that audiences have lost faith in the company, and its movies and TV shows have suffered greatly.
The industry, however, is starting to realize the future it faces and where it will end up if things do not change. Disney CEO Bob Iger announced last year that the company would focus less on their ideologies, and Disney’s movies have been better for it. The live action LILO & STITCH, which released on Memorial Day, broke records for its opening weekend and currently sits at a $633 million box office gross. Incidentally, the movie focuses on family-friendly values, rather than pushing an agenda.
Hollywood created the attention economy and has since lost control of it. However, the industry has a chance to stay relevant if it focuses on creating high-quality stories, rather than trying to outdo social media in the thing it does best.
Read Next: CEO Bob Iger Says Disney Needs to ‘Entertain’ Not ‘Advance Any Kind of Agenda’
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