‘The business models don’t work right now’: Christopher Nolan dissects an entertainment industry reeling from AMPTP greed

Back in 2022, the Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers film painted an awfully dark picture on what the future of Hollywood might look like; little did we know that the reality would be much worse. Indeed, a world where something as cursed as E.T. vs. Batman exists is still infinitely preferable to one where actors and writers — without whom movies as we know them quite literally wouldn’t exist — aren’t paid fairly.

But unfortunately, the latter is the world we’re inhabiting at the moment, and it’s the world we’re going to continue to inhabit until the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers quit making their best Scrooge McDuck impression and agree to support the artists the way they deserve to be supported.

For Christopher Nolan, whose biographical thriller Oppenheimer lands in theaters next week, the problems stem from a combination of dubiously-motivated studio intentions and difficulties with preventing streaming services from being used as a malicious tool. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the storied filmmaker pulled no punches in pointing out the poor state of entertainment business models, taking particular issue with the cost-cutting freedom it seems to hand to studios and executives.

“In the last few years, it’s very often not been clear what a studio’s intention is. Why they’re making a particular project, what they’re then going to do with it, how they monetize it. Do they monetize it at all? Is it a loss leader to drive subscriber growth? A lot of the reason that there’s a strike right now is we have to make the streamers pay the true cost of production. The business models don’t work right now.”

He would go on to call this era a “transitional moment,” suggesting that the hammer must be brought down hard on the notorious streaming practices that are largely responsible for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in the first place.

Indeed, leave it to pro-union box office royalty to be one of the loudest voices on the entertainment industry’s current debacle; perhaps the world would be a much better place if people like Nolan ran this particular show.

Oppenheimer lands in theaters on July 21.