"The difference is that production costs have (in theory) gone way down since then."What's actually quite interesting is that there's been a bifurcation in production costs. The physical costs of production -- equipment, editing software, distribution, and so forth -- have come down dramatically. But Hollywood's cost structure has increased in this same timeframe, because the costs of big talent have gone up. Top actors, directors, writers, source material, producers, and so forth have commanded steadily higher prices. And the outlays on special effects, locations, and other mainstays of blockbuster filmmaking have increased at a steady pace.
We should note that this represents a choice on Hollywood's part. Maybe it's not a monolithic, homogenous, across-the-board choice. Perhaps it's something more like the agglomeration into coherence of a thousand daily choices by a thousand different players in the Hollywood system. Perhaps some of those players -- agents and producers -- have had an outsized impact. Regardless, somehow Hollywood has actively participated in spending more and more each year on production at the same time that it earns less and less each year on distribution and sales.
To your point, the banks and hedge funds got into the game because they recognized these inefficiencies on the production side. They've got deep enough pockets to finance some of the production risk, knowing that they'll always be paid back, so hence, it's not actually risky for them. And, since production keeps getting more expensive, Hollywood will always be out looking for more deficit financing each year. At what point the tail started wagging the dog, or whether it actually has, is anyone's guess. But the general observation is that the hedge-fundization of the system kicked into full swing in the early 2000s.
To my eye, this entire ecosystem looks to be resting on a very shaky foundation. Perhaps existing mega-talent will price itself out of startup filmmaking, but new talent seems to be headed in that direction at a breakneck pace. And, lest we dismiss "alternative" content as the typical, unsophisticated, flash-in-the-pan UGC we've seen on YouTube for so many years, we should take note that a lot of really high-quality independent filmmaking is hitting the charts on Netflix, iTunes, and other sources -- right alongside Hollywood fare. For the time being, Hollywood is in no danger of being displaced by these upstarts. But the mere fact that small fry can get collaboratively filtered right alongside the big fish portends to an eventual disruption of a lot of common assumptions about necessary costs in the Hollywood model.
We live in interesting times.