The Globalization of Localized Creating
How Mom-and-Pop Companies Could Come to Dominate the Film and Entertainment Industry
2023 is coming to a close and soon we will be entering the perilous unknowns of 2024. Things…have gotten heavy in the film and entertainment industry. So much so that there’s been a massive resurgence surrounding our fixation on the future and what it entails for us.
That makes sense because what we decide, today, could determine how we make movies and live as creators, tomorrow. So I thought, as an end-of-the-year blog, it would be cool to give my wild prediction on the future of the film industry based on everything that’s unfolding, today…If only to look back and laugh at how utterly wrong I was!
But I don’t want to just write a list of things because, frankly, we see too many of those. Instead, I wanna focus on one fundamental prediction that I strongly believe in and use this piece to justify why I think it will likely happen. Yes, I know. We can’t know what the future will hold. But who cares?!
It’s a fun topic to ponder, so don’t take what I’m about to say as being the capital “T” truth. Take it as food for thought from someone who has been doing indie filmmaking/screenwriting for 11 years and who recently partnered with his brother to develop AI screenwriting tools for people to land their ideas, faster.
Now…On to the prediction…
(drumroll)
I believe that localized efforts will be capable of scaling globally, and the independent film industry will likely surge because of this. For the longest time, the best way to maximize output and value was to centralize everything into major corporations so that operations could scale nationally and globally.
And, indeed, this is true…But eventually, it won’t be. Of course, there will always be certain businesses and organizations that require centralization, but most of the future companies will realize that they can keep their operations smaller while dramatically scaling distribution. So, in short, localized groups will be able to globalize without having to grow into large organizations.
Consider how cheap and easy it is to do things today with the technology we have. Eventually, it’ll become so cheap and easy that it could stratify the whole industry to the extent that most of our content will either be made by an advanced AI from the few remaining legacy powerhouses or by localized indie creators of all shapes and sizes. However, these smaller creators will be able to produce like mom-and-pop production companies, but market, sell, and distribute like major studios.
It sounds ridiculous, so let me justify this prediction with the following considerations:
Flaws of The Modern Production Process
Not too long ago, when Capitalism and Industrialization were just in their infancy, creating and distributing goods and services were operated by mom-and-pop professionals, often working out of their cottages. This was the era of the Cottage Industry, and like all things, there were pros and cons to this system.
The pro, of course, was that the quality of goods and services based on the technology and knowledge at the time was very high, on average. However, the goods and services lacked consistency in quality and interoperability. Also, none of these businesses could scale and provide adequate output to millions of people since making everything by hand was just too slow to achieve such a feat.
But, then what happened? Well, we invented all these new machines that allowed an individual or a group of people to grow their operations. However, these machines were incredibly expensive and big, which meant that you had to have a large area (like a factory) to house them, you had to have a huge labor force to operate them, and you had to have a ton of money to pay for the space, the machines, and the people running them. So the Cottage Industry died when rich people were given the means to outcompete regular people via new technology.
The benefit was that it allowed us to finally scale creation and distribution so that quality became much more consistent, the prices started dropping, and the availability of products and services became more ubiquitous. It was the foundation, which led to the modern economy that we see today. And, although, it’s been a net benefit over countless decades, it didn’t come without its flaws.
Flaw #1: Quantity over Quality
For one, the quality of goods and services might have been consistent and even very good when this new system first began. But over time, as the technology became more efficient and cost-saving, the quality of goods and services began to diminish so that businesses could focus on producing the highest quantity of products and services.
Quality was nice and maybe essential to some businesses, but for many, quantity became the key to making boatloads of money. This is because with quantity you can serve many more customers over and over again as opposed to serving a few well-to-do customers now and then.
The Film Industry was immune to these trends for a very long time since making and distributing them was so expensive. Only a few could do it, successfully, plus it took a lot longer to produce them. But now it’s much cheaper and faster, and with online digital technology, we have streaming services, both legal and illegal, pouring mountains of content directly into our heads.
So the business model changed from making a limited slate of qualitative movies to making tons of movies where some of them are high in story quality, but most are decent stories that will entertain us for a few hours to keep us on the streaming sites. With major centralized businesses like studios, the cheaper and easier it becomes to make things, the less craftsmanship and quality are put into these things. That is, if the business seeks to scale and serve millions of people, instead of a specific niche of people (think Walmart watches versus Rolex watches).
Flaw #2: Reduction of Talent and Skilled Labor
Second, if quantity grew to become king, then talent and skilled labor were reduced to peasants since it no longer mattered how well you could do something. It was all about how fast you could do it. This led to worse conditions at work and lower pay. And with skills out the window, we the consumers, began to suffer the consequences with lower quality stuff that we use, every day.
Going back to the film industry, even though there are a lot of insanely talented people working in narrative filmmaking, the major studios who’ve essentially cornered the market decided that it’s okay to treat most of them like factory workers instead of artists. Before, it was about producing stuff that would instill awe in an audience. To elicit that required a high amount of artistic discretion and a lot more freedom to express themselves.
But these days, it’s more about producing a lot of content quickly, so everyone from the director to the below-the-line crew is replaceable on most sets since they don’t need the best artists. They just need skilled labor. This is why we’re seeing so much discontent with creators in Hollywood, today, because they’re getting paid less and treated more poorly.
Flaw # 3: Concentration of Power
Third, with huge centralized business operations came unprecedented power in the hands of tycoons who ran these massive companies and began to partner with governments to create more favorable conditions for themselves, often at the expense of citizens and smaller business owners. Now it seems that corporatocracies are replacing democracies across the Western World and cornering entire industries.
For instance, Disney, a company that’s seen exponential growth through its acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox is highly criticized, not only for dominating a majority of the entertainment industry but also for lobbying the U.S. Government to extend their copyright laws. Now their IP is pretty much never released into the public domain.
Another glaring example comes from Comcast and AT&T/WarnerMedia. They heavily lobbied against net neutrality, which would have allowed them to prioritize their content over others on the internet, limiting diversity for consumers and giving less-advantaged creators a harder time getting noticed.
But these are just two out of endless cases involving unfair practices through the partnerships between Hollywood and the government. Everything, from unfair tax advantages to relaxing merger laws, is strengthening their monopolies and turning them into “gatekeepers”.
We’ve certainly done a lot to correct these externalities, but the problems still plague us. So it seems obvious that if we want to solve a lot of these issues, we may want to consider downsizing a lot of our companies. However, the numerous challenges that come with smaller businesses would still affect us, from decreasing the quantity of goods and making quality inconsistent to increased prices and reducing the amount of money entrepreneurs can make.
So how can you expect business leaders and consumers to settle for less? Well…This is where new technology can give us a kind of “third option” to optimize our production and distribution efforts so that we don’t have to settle for less.
The Growing Pace of New Technology
We all know that we’re living in revolutionary times with technology that seems to be getting better by the minute. But that doesn’t equate to a fundamental restructuring of how most people do business. At least, not right this second. However, we’re seeing the early stages like many who had experienced the onset of industrialization.
Assuming we don’t end up in the Stone Age anytime soon, we can anticipate that what we have right now will only become more efficient to the point of changing how everything works. And I believe that, ultimately, these trends will lead to a boom in localized creation and distribution with the capacity to scale globally.
First, there’s the invention of digital technology. We often walk around and don’t think twice about this. But consider the fact that there are trillions of 1s and 0s representing data on the internet that are constantly being bought and sold by people. We place value on electrical signals turning on or off inside of CPUs; so much that we’ve created billion-dollar industries. Video games, saas companies, movies, blogs, podcasts, shows, artwork, cryptocurrency, NFTs, banking, finance, all of it. It’s all just that. Electrical signals.
That’s the digital economy, and what’s advantageous about this is that it’s low marginal cost to produce. So people who create digital goods and services don’t have to sell a kidney to make them, and they can set the price to obtain great profit margins while keeping the price low for the customers. This is especially true given the fact that you can freely distribute these digital assets, instantly, across the World to millions.
However, that’s digital technology. What about physical goods? Well, with advances in 3d printing technology being a high likelihood, we’ll also see a drastic decrease in marginal costs. Right now it’s limited in scope and scale. There are only so many things you can print with so many materials. And although major improvements have been made in the last decade, it still takes a long time to print something. In short, it’s still costlier than how we do things now at scale.
But over time, these problems will be solved to the extent that most of your everyday things will either be produced at home or a local distribution center. This will bring the cost of manufacturing and distribution down considerably, allowing you to get the things you need faster and at a cheaper price. A huge reason why things cost so much is because our current supply chains are dependent on global players. And at the moment, a lot of us aren’t doing so well, economically and socially. This means our shelves and ability to buy the things we need are getting harder and more expensive.
Over time, though, our supply chains will consolidate. In America, for instance, it will be Japan, Canada, Mexico, and a handful of other strategic partners as this is already taking place. Combined with advanced 3d printers, you’re looking at a world where if you want to buy a steady cam, you can simply buy the specs and make it right at home for a fraction of the cost.
And if you need to buy something more advanced like a nice camera, you can buy it from a company that has set up manufacturing and distribution in every city, all run by a few people who operate out of a small town in the middle of nowhere. You’ll get the mom-and-pop touch faster and at a much cheaper price since it’s not being built and shipped to a million different places before it gets to your door.
Then, of course, there’s AI, which will help facilitate these changes that will empower localization to scale. There’s so much speculation about how AI will impact us and, again, no one can predict the future…But that’s never stopped anyone from trying. Like I said. It’s fun!
In my experience working with AI to develop applications tools for screenwriters, my biggest takeaway is that, pretty much, we’re going to see a business landscape characterized by a few major legacy companies that are leaner and meaner with a kaleidoscopic amount of extremely small businesses run by a few people sandwiched in between.
Some of these small businesses will be unprofitable, but some will be wildly profitable. And a lot of them will probably be tokenized so that anyone can invest in them, which means universal basic equity (UBE), an interesting supplement to UBI that not many talk about.
AI will make everything easier and significantly cheaper to do so that a lot of the things we rely on businesses to help us with, individuals will now be able to do on their own. Sure, this will get rid of the single-skilled contractor or employee. But it won’t get rid of the creator. I say creator because it’s a blanket term for anyone who creates something of value and leverages that to obtain money.
Most people make a living by producing things for others, upon request. But tomorrow, most will be supplemented with a UBI and UBE. And many will go further by developing and mastering sets of complementary skills that they can leverage, either by themselves or with a small group, to create original value that can be sold in a market niche.
Maybe it’s physical goods like fashion clothing or crazy computer covers you can’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s original movies or digital experiences. Regardless, the biggest currency in this new economy will be novelty, simply because there will be so many things to consume. Plus, AI isn’t that good at producing new things because it’s based on the compilation of all semantic patterns that humans have created.
So those with the highest level of originality that’s the most pleasing to the highest number of people…Well, they’re gonna be the winners, even in the long run when AI becomes so good that it can produce novelty better than humans.
If/when that happens, of course, we’ll be consuming a lot of purely AI-generated things. But we’re also human, which means another huge currency will be the human connection. We’ll want to feel like we belong to a community, just as we do, today. So even if we can see endless AI-generated content that’s amazing, we’ll still want to invest and be a part of our favorite human creators along with the tribes that they create. I think that’s going to grow the more we chip away at the fabric of our modern industries.
Now here’s where things go down the rabbit hole. We talk a lot about AI, new technology, and how it will impact us…But what about why it’s so important that we adopt it, for better and for worse? There are a lot of answers to this, but one that strikes me the most is the demography argument.
Demography
Contrary to popular belief, the World is facing a demographic collapse. Not everywhere, but in many places this is the case. That’s strange because the World can feel very crowded. And for a long time, we’ve been hearing this narrative from the intellectual communities that we’re trending toward an overpopulation crisis. The problem is, they didn’t factor in how people would behave in a modern society with all these conveniences we have.
Think about it like this. Before Industrialization and the Information Era, most people weren’t living in cities. They were living on farms and because life was so labor-intensive, people had tons of kids. Now jump over to the average modern household, today. They probably live in a city or a suburb with tons of technology that makes their lives muuuuch more simple. Also, they’re probably not living on a big farm, and both parents are probably working. Not to mention the fact that in today’s society, things are very expensive given this mass transition that’s occurring. So people are having fewer kids, if any.
Now for countries like France and America, this transition into modern living happened slowly over 200 years. So our situation is better. But for a lot of developing countries, this occurred in about 30 years. So while their population saw an initial increase, as soon as they settled into modern life, they did what everyone else in the West did. They had fewer kids. Thus, the demographic cliff we’re experiencing globally right now.
Then when you consider the fertility rate decreases that are happening due to the myriad of chemicals that we use to sustain our modern societies, the increase in suicide rates, and the loneliness that a lot of people experience, it becomes apparent that we’re probably going to see a smaller population soon. And with smaller populations comes contracted economies. This means that unless we lean into this new technology, particularly AI and automation, then we’re going to have a challenging time sustaining the economic output that we enjoy today.
This is why I’m more of a techno-optimist, albeit a very cautious one, since all of it’s a double-edged sword and there will undoubtedly be many negative externalities from this “Great Transition”. But with technology, we can be very productive with fewer people. And fewer people + higher productive output at a cheaper price = a supercharged economy that’s far more efficient than the one we have right now.
So regardless of how you feel about this exponential growth of new technology we’re introducing into our communities, it’s probably the only way we’re going to sustain and continue to grow our economies. It’s either more people or more tech, and between those two given the nature of modern living…I think it’s a lot easier to convince people to integrate more technology into their productive workflows than it is to integrate a ton of new babies!
The Film Industry
Okay, so now what do all of these trends mean for the future film industry?
Ultimately, I think this will culminate in a landscape characterized by having a few legacy production powerhouses, like Disney or Sony, with the vast majority of filmmakers and screenwriters being independent and operating in ways that are similar to how social media influencers operate…Only instead of obnoxious rants about bullshit, they’ll have Hollywood-quality movie content that people can invest in, directly, from anywhere in the World.
The legacy studios will still want novel content that’s popular, whether AI is perfected or not. So sure, perhaps most of their bread and butter will be AI-generated stuff with humans assisting “in-house”, they’re still going to partner up with the indie creators who are wildly successful. Everyone else who is either great or very good will keep doing what they love, independently, for supplemental income, or an actual salary. And then the vast majority, like most trying to break into the industry, today, will try and get nowhere. I mean, making a great story and getting a lot of people to notice is hard no matter how much technology improves.
Again, this sounds crazy. But consider the extreme animus that’s forming around studios and how they’re treating creators, technology that’s making everything so much faster and cheaper to make, and the demographic issues we’re facing, which will make it harder and more expensive for studios, big and small to hire a large highly skilled workforce. It just makes sense that the film industry will go this way, given the circumstances. And that means the future for most who take up the craft will lie in localized, independent filmmaking.
My brother and I are members of this huge film collective in Baltimore, MD called Charmcity Filmmakers. It’s amazing because when we first joined, there were maybe 5 or 6 people who met, discussed filmmaking, and loosely helped each other with short films. Now there are hundreds of members, ranging from highly experienced professionals to folks who have no idea what they’re doing.
Charmcity Filmmakers went from making one film every year or so to making at least 30 or 40 short films a year. Oh, and we have an actual studio, now, which we’re gearing up to make our first feature using connections and resources we only dreamed of having. And even though we’re the biggest in Maryland, many smaller organizations are doing similar things.
All of us at Charmcity Filmmakers forged teeth on an organization that could have easily puttered out. Now it seems like every year we’re growing because there’s just so much more we can do with less, and we’re seeing a whole hell of a lot more people interested in getting into independent filmmaking because it’s much easier than ever before.
So what do you think will happen to organizations like Charmcity Filmmakers when it gains access to more new talent as well as existing talent that drops off from Hollywood and goes back home? Right now, our professionals are commercial filmmakers and screenwriters who are on the verge of breaking out.
But in the future, as the landscape evolves, more skilled and creative people will be seeking alternatives for getting their content out. They’ll partner up with groups like Charmcity Filmmakers, or they’ll form their syndicates with creatives they vibe with and trust.
These will likely be the new studios generating most of the content with some getting plucked out of the crowd by legacy companies.
Of course, all filmmaking will eventually go fully digital and will be able to be done on a single computer by one person. But by then we’ll be inundated with so much tech that I think many will have the desire to take a hybrid approach to filmmaking, using both digital and traditional methods, if only to have an excuse to get out of their houses and physically interact with a community of like-minded people. It’s kinda like why movie theaters still exist. They don’t have to, but they do because people want a reason to go out with friends. It’ll likely be a similar situation with filmmaking.
Conclusion
We’ve long recognized and lived with the many flaws associated with our current system. But with revolutionary technology getting better at an exponential rate, we’re beginning to see a “Plan B” that’s much needed in the wake of an economic and demographic disaster.
And because of these trends, I genuinely believe that the new film industry will be mostly made up of independents within localized areas distributing their content globally and making money directly from their fans. And the talent will be like it is today. It’ll range from fantastic creators to down-right terrible ones.
A few legacy studios will remain, but their primary role will likely be showcasing superior AI-generated content on massive digital platforms and plucking out the few legendary creators to make those, “Hey check out our platform” movies that will encourage people to continue buying into these companies.
Again, everything that I’m saying could be totally wrong. I’m just a dude working with his brother to make AI writing tools for screenwriters. My background is in writing and film. I’m not some big-shot Harvard scholar or anything, so take all of this as merely an opinion from someone who reads a lot and thinks deeply about these matters.
I write a lot about this, not just because I’m fascinated by the topic, but because I feel that it’s extremely important for everyone to recognize these trends. This is a moment for creators to seize upon a great opportunity to transform the industry into a much more positive experience for themselves. Right now, it seems that everyone is looking to Hollywood for all the solutions, but if we passively rely on them to shape the new industry then we could see a future that’s characterized as having “fewer chairs” at the table.
That, to me, is unacceptable because fewer chairs mean fewer voices and fewer voices mean more controlled narratives and perspectives about reality from the concentrated top. That needs to end, and it starts with individuals imagining and realizing what could be instead of dwelling on what we have right now, which is crap…Well, not all of it, but you know what I mean.
Thank you for taking the time to check out this blog and, as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors! Also happy holidays and have a great new year!!
Story Prism
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