Can Anyone Develop Movies Around Here?

Peak Hollywood, Nadir Hollywood

2025 is projected to be the best domestic box office year since 2019. We have not seen a dramatic break from the past two years (year to date is actually -7% vs. 2023), but the 2025 total is expected to surpass 2023 by end of year, so we are going in the right direction.

But not quickly – 2025 domestic box office is still likely to be ~17% down from 2019.

There are several reasons for the decline in box office, including fewer US screens, a shorter theatrical window, and habits changing from COVID, but I’m going to suggest two more reasons, which are fixable: Hollywood has a comedy drought and a development problem.

Comedy

Comedy has been 1.9% of box office in 2025. I will be brief on this subject because I have discussed it before. But here is the comedy box office chart. You can see the decline from a steady15% - 20% per year to today’s totally unfunny 1.9%, starting in 2013.

Even the numbers we see above are exaggerated because kids films like Disney’s Haunted Mansion are counted as “comedies.”

Some have said that what’s really happening is that comedies are going to streaming. So there are just as many comedies getting just as much attention as before, but it’s on streaming. But what exactly are they talking about? Name one strong original comedy that was direct to streaming. People are not releasing comedies that are not working. They are just not releasing comedies. If comedy is 1.9% of box office now and it used to be at least 15%, does that mean that we are not serving 13% of demand?

Now, wait. How far down are we from 2019? Did you say 17%? Hmm. Is there a relationship here?

Quality

Here is the other factor – it is essential for this whole thing that we call the business of show to make good movies. Did you see the New York Times Top 100 films thing recently where they determined the top 100 films of the century so far? Well, here is how the top 100 break down by three year groupings:

I didn’t draw that line by the way, Google drew the line, so that’s just math.

Does it seem odd that the periods from 2000 to 2017 average 14 “Top 100” films per three year period and then in 2018-2023, where we would expect 28 films, we get 15 films instead, even though these films are more recent and therefore fresher in mind?

Is it COVID? Is it strikes? Anti-recency bias? Or … worse movies?

My suggestion, and no one is allowed to say this so it’s good that we can chat here, is that the movies are actually worse.

Compare the results in TV. I have discussed this before, but let’s look again at the number of new American series rated 8 or above on IMDb per year by year.

So from 2014-2019, we average 20 x 8+ shows per year. From 2020-2024, we average 10 x 8+ shows per year. Now, I understand there was COVID, but the total number of shows did not go down 50%.

To me it looks like there are multiple factors but something is happening around quality – something bad. And I probably would not have this suspicion if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes (well, ears) that there was a marked change in development around 2017 and the ensuing years. Obviously, as everyone knows, everything became very political. One manifestation of that was a sense that anything too “elite” was bad and anything too hard to write was elite. So if you had pitched Mad Men or maybe Sopranos, two strong shows from Hollywood’s “peak quality era,” they would certainly have encountered resistance.

It’s as if after Rembrandt died, the market decided that his style of painting makes other painters feel bad and we have to set a lower bar.

Rembrandt, “Self-Portrait with Two Circles,” c. 1665-1669

Did we not get Succession? Did we not make White Lotus, Hacks, and The Bear? Of course. I am not saying that quality went to zero without exceptions or that there were zero comedies. I am saying that their numbers declined dramatically.

Are the New York Times Top 100 and IMDb bad indicators of overall quality? Well. IMDb is definitely not a bad indicator of quality because in my experience it does a great job predicting viewership in the future. So there is something to those scores even if they did give Lost in Translation a mere 7.7/10.

With respect to the New York Times piece, make of it what you will. I think it represents something real. At least, I think it’s much more commercially relevant than the Sight & Sound Top 100, for example. I suppose you might argue that actually everything is okay. But if everything is okay, why are so many movies disappointing?

Two Examples

Let’s look quickly at two films that came out recently, The Materialists (IMDb 6.8) and Elio (IMDb 7.0). No two films can tell us everything that is happening in Hollywood, but I think these point us toward some useful insight. I am not going to go through these films in every detail but I will hit the big points.

The question I am addressing is – what does it look like when people just are not developing movies very well?

The Materialists (warning: spoilers)

In the film, Dakota Johnson is Lucy Mason, who is a matchmaker in NY. She grew up “poor.” which doesn’t read at all. In the course of her business she encounters private equity guy Pedro Pascal (Harry Castillo). They are both single and they met at a wedding so naturally they start to date, where she finds that Harry/Pedro is basically the perfect guy. But this doesn’t sit well with Lucy because she thinks, based on her expertise, that she is not enough for him. (It’s difficult to position professionally attractive actors as ugly ducklings, but she focuses on her age, which to me didn’t make sense for Pedro Pascal, but whatever.) Meanwhile, Lucy’s semi-employed ex Chris Evans (John Finch), who does not have his life figured out at all, comes back into the scene. So, you see the set up. Rich guy. Poor guy. Will she follow her heart? (Let’s hope not!)

The Materialists would not have been made in its current form in any prior era because (a) it is a never funny comedy, (b) it is trying to be deep but has thin characters, and (c) it is full of long, theatrical monologues (which might conceivably be tolerable but for the other two issues).

One problem with an emotionally resonant NY romantic dramedy is that James L. Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Nora Ephron and Woody Allen exist or have existed. So the standard is kind of high. It’s like debuting an opera at the Met. Funny, moving, real, genuine, original, and deep is the standard for this sort of film. We are circling this in The Materialists but we never get there.

I mean. She’s a matchmaker. And we have some slices of life early on about her life. You can’t have one or two amusing matchmaker moments? I don’t get it but I feel like there was someone in here who said “see, back in the bad old days we would have had a hilarious joke here and now we get to skip that.” Crazy choice.

What does it mean to have a thinly drawn character? Well, let’s take Harry Castillo. For a minute, I was thinking that Harry reminded me of a friend of mine. They look kind of similar. They’re in the same business. But then I realized – how would I know if they were alike? We don’t know Harry at all except for the superficial characteristics that I have already conveyed. Would I be friends with him? Who are his friends? Who are her parents? She grew up poor? How so? It’s important to create specific characters. You know who they are and why.

When characters have no personal context and everything is generic (where is his apartment in NY anyway?), it just can’t get started. Look at The Way We Were. They have a whole backstory in college. Look at Annie Hall, where we spend a lot of time with both families. Look at The Graduate. It is essential to create characters that are real, who have context. They have to live in a specific place on a specific block. They need to be as real as people you know. We want to understand why they are the way they are and they too need to be surprised and delighted by what happens. So they have to talk in specifics. That’s how life is.

And occasionally it should be funny.

Just to back myself up, there were some pretty good insights from the actual IMDB reviews.

• Kimberlya7 said in her review “On what planet did someone rate this a 10?”: “It was so bad. The awkward pauses, the effort it was taking to believe any of these people were attracted to each other. The idea of the story isn’t terrible, but everything else about this was just awful. If you wanna see it don’t pay for it.”

• dilpreet-558 said: “The story offered nothing substantial … when you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing. When you have absolutely nothing to say, maybe don’t go make a movie about it. Not every movie has to change your life but it should at least leave an impression. The cinematography and set design were flawless.”

• steiner-sam wrapped things up, I thought, with: “It’s not funny enough to be a comedy, romantic enough to be a romance, or dramatic enough to be a drama.”

So I’m not crazy.

In any normal time, The Materialists would first get a quick title change so it doesn’t sound like a Political Science seminar, and then it would get many, many notes. And one fine day years from now a version that works would finally come out. And that’s ok. It’s better for everyone.

But we are not in normal times.

Elio (warning: minor spoilers)

When you have story problems, they almost always trace back to act one. In acts two and three you have your set pieces, where they dance and celebrate, you have the action sequence, you have the sequence where they realize that they should have been friends all along, and the one where their weakness turns out to be their greatest strength. But none of the business in acts two and three will matter if we don’t set up act one with strong, relatable characters that people care about.

I have heard that the tale of getting Elio produced is quite complicated. I don’t really want to dive deep on those intricacies. However it came about, Elio, sadly, just never nailed act one. Elio himself is an uninteresting character who has no relationships that we care about. Why was Bambi immediately interesting and yet sad sack Elio is not? You know, at the end of the day that’s the difference between strong writing and not strong writing.

Elio lost his parents somehow. And therefore he wants to go to space and meet aliens. OK. And that is what happens. Really? And they bring a lot of trouble of their own because there is a big two dimensional villain amongst them. Uh huh (checking watch).

Part of the problem is that in this story Rudolph doesn’t have a red nose that shines so bright. When you have an oddball thrust into solving a big problem, you want your odd characteristic to turn out to be just the thing to save the day. We didn’t quite get there this time.

And each sequence after act one felt like it owed as much to other stories as to the story we had seen thus far.

It’s not so much that it’s predictable. It is, but it is really that we don’t care.

In Conclusion

1. Never make anything for bad reasons.

2. There is only one good reason: this film is going to be amazing.

Who would not do these movies? Michael Eisner. Peter Guber. Jeff Katzenberg. Dawn Steel. Robert Evans. Adolph Zukor. Irving Thalberg…

You know, it’s kind of a long tradition with standards and a long record of success that we have. You can rely on some of these story principles that have worked before. We already know how this works!

Do you know how many drafts of Tootsie they did? Do you think that none of those drafts were pretty good? Of course they were. But they weren’t amazing. So in the end they paid Larry Gelbart a million dollars to do that final draft and make it golden brown. And that worked. (I know this story because my father made that deal.)

What we have to remember is that this business runs on exceptions. For every studio that’s done well, a small handful of truly great movies and shows did the heavy lifting.

Solid doesn’t move the needle. Exceptional does. Getting there is hard. It takes drafts. Disagreement. Real development.

Yes, there are challenges: theatrical windows, audience habits, COVID aftermath. But the biggest opportunity is still the oldest: make something great. Align with the audience. Obsess over quality.

Start with getting the first ten pages right. Then everything else gets easier.

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.