Hollywood is on the ventilator and tech billionaires are planning the funeral. Audiences and creatives are confronted with the new reality of the entertainment landscape. In a sea of formulaic streaming content, skill and storytelling are increasingly overshadowed by talks of metrics and profitability.
Once a beacon of hope for those who dreamed of success in the film and television industry, Hollywood positioned itself as the cultural centre of global entertainment. Today, its sagging cinema business is being reshaped in real time by executives haggling over billion-dollar deals.
The Skydance-Paramount merger last summer made this shift undeniable. Played out against the backdrop of rising political extremism in the United States, the $8.4 billion deal symbolises how entangled corporate and political power have become. While corporate cannibalisation is nothing new in the profit-forward American free market, the circumstances surrounding this merger have exposed this brazen knee-bend to power. Central to the controversy is a $16 million lawsuit settlement paid by Paramount to Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris, which Trump claims was edited to make her “look better”. Popular late night show host Stephen Colbert’s dismissal came swiftly — only three days — after he called the settlement a “big fat bribe”. The Late Show franchise itself is being retired entirely in May 2026.
If Colbert’s sacking was the stick, the appointment of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News was the carrot. Weiss’ early tenure coincided with the dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives within CBS, signalling a broader editorial shift towards political appeasement. Under this newly sanitised editorial environment, a 60 Minutes investigation by journalist Sharyn Alfonsi into the treatment of detainees forcibly imprisoned in El Salvador was reportedly halted.
For cinema, the implications seem bleak. In an unsurprising Orwellian twist, the same logic governing newsrooms, punishing dissent and complexity now also governs the film industry. Far from being a purely financial manoeuvre, mergers allow for a change in the narrative. By determining which stories are killed and which are permitted to flourish based on the dogma of the billionaire-class, studios seem to be willing to flatten nuance and welcome the bland slop-ification of film and TV for their payday.
As the Paramount dust settles, the industry faces an even larger threat: Netflix’s $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. and HBO Max. Rumours speculate Netflix is slashing theatrical releases to only 17 days. Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has previously described such releases as an ‘outmoded idea’, and this move clarifies the horrific content churning vision that lies ahead. In early 2026, emerging as the final boss of acquisitions, the newly formed Paramount entity launched an aggressive hostile takeover of Warner Bros. with $108.4 billion on the line, challenging the Netflix deal.
In this model, cinema is no longer the communal or personal ritual that we’ve all come to cherish. We risk creative stagnation and cultural amnesia with every new subscription service that we depend on. The experience of visiting a theatre, being immersed in the sound, emotion and spectacle of the big screen and dark room is cinema’s charm – not dozing off while multiple episodes play until your device dies. With this move, theatre releases risk becoming little more than a marketing formality before the movie is funnelled into algorithmic streaming archives.
In his documentary HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis describes a cultural state where people know the system is corrupt but are unable to imagine a better future. We are living in it now, trapped by tech conglomerates and their software reflecting our obsessions back to us. As legacy studios are swallowed, we must not let this state of helplessness kill our incentive to physically preserve and share film prints.
But the death of Hollywood is not the end of cinema. In 2026, a growing analogue media revolution is sparking a charge as people rediscover the collective joy found in film: small theatres hosting local screenings, 16mm and 35mm festivals, zines celebrating forgotten directions, and independent collectives distributing micro-budget works. Visit the Light House Cinema in Smithfield, make sure you get your 25-under Student card at the Irish Film Institute (IFI), and yes, go hunting for out-of-print DVDs in charity shops! At this stage of cinema, even the deliberate return to physical is a radical act of resistance.