National Review: How creativity died in Hollywood

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Modern screenwriting is in a crisis. From Hollywood to the peanut gallery, nobody is happy about the most important part of the storytelling business: the storytelling. Just as we are beset by soulless franchise installments, faithless adaptations, and remakes that nobody asked for, we are awash in some of the lowest-quality writing in the history of moving pictures.

“Craft in writing has often been replaced by pure arrogance,” says David Zucker, whose directing credits include Airplane!, Top Secret!, and the first two Naked Gun installments. Part of the problem is the “increased corporate control of Hollywood,” he tells me, unlike the days when “real creatives such as executives Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, and brilliant creatives like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” ran the show. There are still pockets of creatives, Zucker adds, “but mostly the business has been taken over by mediocre little people.”

We live in the era of endless spin-offs, reboots, pre-boots, sequels, prequels, and “other derivative trash,” as Zucker puts it. “In fact, the most recent Naked Gun was very similar to an AI version.” The failure of the Star Wars sequels is owed not only to lazy writing but to no writing at all. Disney relaunched the franchise without first plotting a narrative course....

“There used to be a secondary market for films with video and DVD sales,” says screenwriter Aviv Rubinstien. “The Shawshank Redemption . . . was a box-office failure. It found its audience only on home video. The current state of the industry makes something like that impossible. . . . There is no way to make your money back except through first-run theatrical box office,” he says, but “theatrical windows are so short that people simply wait for movies on streaming.”

Instant streaming entertainment has produced hundreds of new shows and movies. It is also killing theaters: More than 5,600 screens have closed in the U.S. in the last few years. Ticket sales in 2025 were 780 million compared with the 1.2 billion tickets sold in 2019. Between 2019 and 2025, domestic box office revenue fell from approximately $11.4 billion to about $8.6 billion, a decline of 24 percent. You can blame the Covid-19 pandemic for some of this, but certainly not all....

This brings us to one of the larger problems of streaming entertainment, and of online journalism as well: quantity, not quality, is king. The streaming production model naturally incentivizes rushed output because a streaming platform is only as good as its latest offering. But quality and speed cannot coexist. The lightning-fast streaming production model doesn’t just allow for sloppy writing; it practically encourages it.

Total employment of Writers Guild of America screenwriters has fallen sharply in recent years. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of feature-film screenwriters declined by roughly 12 percent — a loss of nearly 300 jobs. TV has had it worse, hit by a decline in TV subscriptions and cable programming, the end of the streaming boom, fewer series orders, and shorter “seasons.” (In the old days, a TV show’s season could run to two dozen episodes; now, it’s more likely to be eight or fewer.) As a result, TV series writing jobs fell by nearly 600 between 2020 and 2024. The 2023–24 television season was particularly rough: only 1,819 total writing jobs, a 42 percent decline from the prior season.

And then there’s the artificial intelligence problem. Though writers sent a clear and painful message in 2023 with an industry-wide strike, the problem didn’t go away. Major studios, including Netflix, Warner Bros., and Paramount, are still outsourcing portions of production and creation to machines. It is too attractive a proposition: use a robot to do faster and for free what once required paying humans for their labor....

“I can’t count how many of my friends have left because their jobs were made ‘irrelevant,’” says Rubinstien of his fellow screenwriters. “The work dried up, and all we’ll have to show for it is derivative AI slop.” The fewer the professional writers, the fewer the professional scripts; the more insular the industry, the less the creativity and originality....

Franchises and reboots have gotten out of control, demanding the attention of major studios to the point of blotting out smaller, original, and creative projects. “Movie studios for the last 25 years have focused on ‘sure things’ — popular books and comics, remakes, and sequels,” says Lamson. “They don’t want to take a chance on original storytelling.”

So this is what we get instead: Nearly as many King Kong movies have been produced in the past nine years as were made in the entire 83 years ...

The numbers do not even account for Disney live-action and “photorealistic” remakes, of which there are roughly 25 (and counting). These represent one of the worst trends of the past several decades: the strip-mining of intellectual property, with Disney among the most prolific offenders. Hollywood long ago learned to co-opt well-known intellectual properties for their brand value and squeeze every last penny out of them. The problem now is that strip-mining thrives even as the writing pool shrinks. Some writers, like Barnett, say the financial incentives have gone haywire, with top studio executives “giving themselves ridiculous raises” even as we “see Hollywood tanking.”

Another problem, though harder to quantify, is that writers fall prey to the social edicts of modern culture, which demand constant evangelization for secular causes and tiptoeing around the English language. For audiences, it’s become a familiar experience to be immersed in an on-screen story only to be hit with ham-fisted intrusions meant to “educate” them. Instead of character and plot, you’re served up a lecture in dialogue form or scolded for the sins of your father.....

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Few want to admit it, probably because this explanation is the least complimentary to an industry that prizes its veneer of artistry, but the chief reason modern entertainment writing has degraded is that the audience’s standards have degraded. Why should Hollywood make the effort to produce high-quality work with high-quality writing when audiences are willing to pay for fast and cheap?

Perhaps one factor is the decline of reading. In 2025, an astonishing 40 percent of Americans did not read a single book, according to YouGov; the median American read just two. In 2023, 13 percent of U.S. adults with more than a high school education scored at the lowest level of literacy or below — more than double the 6 percent recorded in 2017. In 2022, less than half (48.5 percent) of American adults reported reading even one book, while the percentage of U.S. adults who read novels or short stories declined to just 37.6 percent, down 17 percent from 2012.

Say what you will of Hollywood, but it remains a business, and businesses answer to consumer demand. How does it answer an apathetic audience that settles for the subpar? With the subpar. Disney may put out soulless live-action and “photorealistic” remakes, but those remakes have a habit of grossing mountains of cash (2025’s Lilo and Stitch made $1 billion, 2019’s The Lion King made $1.6 billion, 2017’s Beauty and the Beast made $1.2 billion, and so on).

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