The Democratic Promise of Globalized Film and Television

Bluey is an Australian children’s show featuring a family of anthropomorphized cattle dogs. It is also a global phenomenon. Since the show was added to Disney+, Americans have spent a collective 32.82 billion minutes watching the Heeler family’s gentle parenting. That is several billion more minutes than the total viewing time for the record-breaking 2024 Super Bowl. The show, meant for preschoolers, is currently ranked 14 on the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDB) list of the top 250 shows ever made, with an average user score as high as feted shows like Band of Brothers and The Wire.

This would have been unlikely in a pre-digital era, when an aspiring animator would have had to relocate to Hollywood and punch the clock for an American studio that could afford to produce expensive, animated shows. But the creator of Bluey, Joe Brumm, worked out of a small studio in Brisbane, Australia. In global film and television industry terms, this was a backwater of a backwater. Yet the Down Under success of Bluey attracted Disney, which acquired its global streaming rights—worth an estimated $2 billion. Disney was merely attempting to keep pace with Netflix, which, as of 2024, spends more on foreign-made movies and TV shows than it does on all North American productions combined.

Bluey’s surprising success is emblematic of the ongoing transformation of the film and television industry. New digital technologies have radically globalized and democratized TV production and distribution. Informational goods, like entertainment, are particularly amenable to rapid globalization, which is, simply put, the free movement across political borders of people, ideas, capital, goods, and services. The World Wide Web is fundamentally globalist, a (mostly) borderless and (mostly) untaxed network that facilitates spontaneous cultural exchange at an unprecedented scale. As a result, it has never been easier or cheaper to make, share, and watch high-quality film and TV, launching an era of ever-increasing global exchange and visual innovation.

The fundamental problem with making film and television is that, in the words of screenwriter William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” He meant that predicting box office success is a crapshoot, neither science nor art. The most well-regarded work often fails, while surprise hits crop up out of nowhere. Thus, the acclaimed Citizen Kane (1941) flopped at the box office yet micro-budget flick Paranormal Activity (2007) returned nearly 200 times its investment. Even knowing what has worked in the past is no guarantee. As an executive at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation put it, “If we set out to make half a billion dollars by creating a new Bluey then we’d fail. For all [the show’s] success, it’s lightning in a bottle.”

Goldman’s aphorism—the “nobody knows property”—is a problem because of the high stakes involved in the film industry. The expense of financing, distributing, and promoting a movie or TV series can be immense. While it was true, to quote a former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, that “very few entities in this world can afford to spend $200 million on a movie,” a bad enough flop could still sink a studio. Historically, that created an incentive structure that led to the consolidation of the studios into a handful of major companies. The studio system mitigated the dangers inherent to producing uncertain products with high sunk costs through economies of scale and by pooling risk. Only about 10 percent of movie releases ever made a significant profit, as economist Harold Vogel once noted, but that was sufficient to finance the 70 percent that failed outright and the 20 percent that broke even; it was a viable strategy for an organization with enough capital to survive the lean spells.

It also propelled vertical integration in which the studios acquired movie theaters, giving them significant control over film distribution (especially until antitrust action in 1948). In addition, the big six studios operated as a semi-monopsony regarding creative talent. Aspiring actors, filmmakers, and showrunners had vanishingly few other options for selling their labor; thus, restrictive contracts and broken promises of box office backend were routine.

Gradually, over the back half of the 20th century, the centralized Hollywood model slowly broke down under increased competitive pressures. That included the rise of the indie film festival circuit, which gave non-studio filmmakers a market to showcase and sell their films and to attract top acting talent. Likewise, government deregulation in the late 1970s enabled the proliferation of cable channels in the 1980s, which offered an alternative distribution mechanism for films and TV shows; the theater box office now had to compete with the likes of the Home Box Office (HBO).

These new venues for creators and new channels for distribution to consumers sparked a Golden Age of Television. HBO, for example, was an innovation engine even in its early years. It experimented with shows that would have been considered either too niche or too obscene for primetime broadcasting, such as Tales from the Crypt and the pioneering news satire show Not Necessarily the News. By the turn of the century, television—once considered a second-run proposition for aging movie stars—increasingly competed with film studios for talent and financing.

“Prestige” TV shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men—a single season of which could cost as much as a movie to produce—also fueled rising consumer demand for boxed VHS or DVD sets, a highly lucrative revenue stream for an industry no longer solely reliant on box office receipts. Every new movie or TV show became an opportunity to quadruple dip on revenue: a theatrical release, VHS/DVD sales, broadcast syndication, and eventually, streaming rights. While “US population grew by 41 percent,” as economist Joel Waldfogel notes, “movie revenue grew by almost 400 percent” by the turn of the 21st century.

Still, these changes to the movie industry were fairly incremental, albeit a useful reminder that expanded market competition promotes innovation and consumer welfare. But what has happened since the turn of the 21st century is anything but incremental. The rise of the internet and the advent of new digital technologies have accelerated the transformation of film and TV.

To borrow a concept from Waldfogel, it is helpful to think of making a movie or show as buying an “expensive lottery ticket.” The odds that any particular ticket will win are small, but if you pool resources and buy enough tickets, it may be possible to guarantee a hit. This is not only the plot of the 2022 movie Jerry & Marge Go Large—starring Bryan Cranston—but an apt description of how Old Hollywood increased its odds of winning at the box office by concentrating capital investment in a handful of studios.

But now consider what would happen if one could lower the price of lottery tickets while simultaneously increasing the number of winning tickets. More people would buy more tickets! As a result, the necessity of a capital concentration strategy would wane. That is what the digitization of production and the rise of globalized distribution channels have done for the film and television industry. Cheaper camera and editing technologies—which are themselves products of globalization—have allowed many more films and shows to be produced. And new distribution channels increase the odds that any given project will succeed in at least one regional audience in the global marketplace. Globalization has meant more movies and TV shows produced more cheaply than ever before.

Until the 2000s, most movies and shows were shot using expensive film cameras, each of which could cost at least $250,000. Even the film stock was expensive and required a significant number of crew to handle; a 90-minute movie required perhaps 9,000 feet of film, translating into nine film reels that weighed in total about 60 pounds. And thousands of copies of the film had to be sent to movie theaters across the country. Even setting aside salaries and other expenses, the cost of the cameras and film alone could be exorbitant.

Digital cameras have exponentially reduced that cost. While there are still expensive cameras—such as those used to film for IMAX—there are now consumer-grade cameras that can capture picture quality as high as even the highest-grade film cameras of a generation ago. The 2014 Academy Award–winning documentary The Lady in Number 6 was shot with a Canon 5D Mark III, which retails for about $1,500. For comparison, that is little more than what it once cost to rent a film camera for a single day of shooting. The cost of editing has followed suit. A cutting-edge Ediflex nonlinear editing system in the 1980s cost $150,000 (about $429,000 in 2024 dollars). Today, movies and shows edited with software like Final Cut Pro—which retails for $300—routinely win major cinema awards.

The result is that any relationship between big budget and high quality has blurred. Director Edward Burns made the 2011 indie darling Newlyweds on a total budget of $9,000 using a Canon 5D Mark II and free iMovie software. As Burns puts it, “If you can scrounge together a few thousand dollars, you can make the kind of film you want to make without having to worry about making your money back.” Given the proliferation of smartphones with quality cameras, Burns further imagined, “If you’re a kid who wants to go out and shoot a movie as a one-man band, it’s great.” It is a sentiment echoed by directing legend Francis Ford Coppola: “One day, some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camcorder, and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever.”

It is telling that the limits of Coppola’s imagination extended only as far as Ohio (which, to be fair, might as well be Timbuktu in the Hollywood mind). The reality is that cheaper tools have expanded the pool of creators to include people from all over the world. It is hard to exaggerate just how much more global our televisual diets are today. It used to be hard to find foreign content, often requiring visiting an arthouse cinema or a niche movie rental store. But today, one can open an app and watch a bewildering array of high-quality content on demand, from Trollhunter, a Norwegian mockumentary-style creature feature, to South Korea’s Parasite, the first non-English film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Digitization has not only globalized the creation of film and television; it has also widened its distribution. High-speed internet enabled the creation of streaming video platforms that have global audiences and a voracious appetite for content. This has decentered Hollywood and given a particular boost to “smaller-market repertoires” from Scandinavia, East Asia, and Latin America.

This is practicable because the marginal cost of distribution for informational goods—whether newspapers or movies and TV shows—has fallen to near zero. In a pre-digital era, every additional copy of a book, CD, or tape that was made and sold carried additional costs. That was a function of both its material inputs and the expense required to move the object from the site of production through the point of sale to the moment of consumption (expenses that grew with global distance). But the 1,000th copy of a digital good costs no more than the 10th copy. And that holds true regardless of location and distance. The marginal cost to stream a movie in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is the same as in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

Furthermore, globalization and digitization have allowed studios and streamers to develop a “digital farm system,” a way of discovering local hits that they can either redistribute or remake for other regional markets. For example, Netflix used data generated by its tens of millions of subscribers to identify a promising intersection of trends: their subscribers 1) were fans of films made by David Fincher, 2) liked actor Kevin Spacey, and 3) disproportionately borrowed copies of a critically well-regarded but obscure 1990 British political thriller titled House of Cards.

Based on that data, Netflix acquired the rights to the show and green-lighted an American remake with Fincher and Spacey. It became the first original streaming show to win an Emmy and helped Netflix triple its subscriber base. Globalization is no panacea, but it appears capable of improving upon the old gut intuition approach to predicting the future success of film and television. We might have to soften Goldman’s principle from “nobody knows anything” to “sometimes, somewhere somebody knows something.”

The globalization of film and television distribution has been a rising tide raising all boats. American movie studios now earn as much as three-quarters of total box office receipts from international markets. That revenue has papered over a steady decline in domestic ticket sales, which, even before the pandemic, had fallen by 25 percent between 2002 and 2019. Studios have been able to compensate for their losses to cable, streaming, and user-created competitors by pitching their content to international audiences. Globalization has been a lifeline for Hollywood.

Movies that underperform expectations in the domestic box office can sometimes make up the difference by overperforming in foreign markets. That even applies to the highest-grossing movies of all time, such as James Cameron’s Avatar. Given its high production and marketing expenses (about $500 million), Avatar would have been only a moderate success based on domestic receipts alone (about $785 million).

But a movie that North Americans saw as a “standard, perhaps preachy, allegory about racism and environmental destruction” struck Chinese audiences as a timely message about the “forced appropriation of property” by government-sanctioned developers demolishing homes to throw up high-rises and highways. International receipts passed $2.138 billion, turning a moderate success into a historic triumph. Nobody in Hollywood can reliably predict these specific cultural resonances, but a wider global audience increases the odds that any given movie or show will be a hit somewhere in the world, whether in theaters or on streaming services.

This also cuts against a popular narrative about the relationship between Hollywood and China that goes something like this: The American film industry was once capable of producing innovative, novel, mid-budget films. But then China entered the picture, with its massive filmgoing audience gatekept by censorial Communist Party officials. As a result, Hollywood became more risk-averse and more reliant on safe sequels with broad global appeal.

The problem with this story is that by the time China entered the picture, the Hollywood studio model was already unsustainable. As one distribution executive put it, “When studios greenlight a movie, it used to be about, ‘What are the DVD sales going to be?’” But competition from streaming platforms had choked off the addicted studios’ access to so uncut a form of revenue. Instead, executives now cared about one question: “How’s the movie going to do in China?” The result, as entertainment journalist Ben Fritz put it in 2016, was that “China is now the wallet. And Hollywood is the factory.”

Understanding that reality flips the story of China and Hollywood on its head. The global expansion of the film industry to China was not the cause of Old Hollywood’s decline but rather a consequence. Indeed, pivoting to blockbusters and sequels with an appeal to a Chinese audience was a life raft for American studios—but one that only temporarily masked the ongoing decline of an already failing industry. If China had not been an option, it would have merely advanced the eschaton, as it were; the conversations about the end of Hollywood that we are having in the 2020s might simply have taken place in the 2010s instead.

Globalization has fueled a radical democratization of the film and television industry. The Old Hollywood pipelines for funneling (and controlling) creative talent and capital financing have burst wide open. “Until now, those of us in the television and film business had been able to wait for the talent to find us,” said Spacey in 2013, because “we had the keys to the kingdom, and folks needed to bring us their stories if they wanted to find a route to an audience.” Hollywood, as an enterprise, had profited from its gatekeeping power; whether that system benefited either customers or creative talent is another matter entirely.

But now, because of digitization and globalization, an unprecedented number of people worldwide can bypass the big studios and make and distribute films and television on their own. This is upsetting to former cultural tastemakers, such as New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who once complained about the excessive number of indie films being sold to distributors at indie film festivals because “dumping ‘product’ into theaters … damages an already fragile ecosystem” (and creates unwelcome additional work for film critics). It is not hard to understand why organizations and individuals who benefited from the older, less competitive era of the film and TV industry would be dismayed that today “the impulse to make a film has far outrun the impulse to go out and watch in a theater.” Their livelihoods are at stake.

Sometimes, the cultural gatekeepers are backed by the power of the state. During trade negotiations involving the United States and the European Union in 1993—which ultimately led to the creation of the World Trade Organization—the French minister of culture, Jacques Toubon, worried that unrestricted access of Hollywood studios to European audiences would destroy their local film and television industries. “We must not let our souls be asphyxiated, our eyes blinded, our businesses enslaved,” Toubon fulminated, and to which French President Francois Mitterand added, “A society that relinquishes to others its means of representation, is an enslaved society.” This species of cultural obscurantism propels domestic film quotas, industry subsidies, and other attempts to protect from foreign cultural influence.

Their fears came true, to an extent. France’s protectionist film industry “mega subsidies” failed to “stop [the] US content onslaught,” to quote one breathless headline. By 2014, US-produced programming owned a 66.4 percent market share in Europe. But that was a shortsighted complaint; even as European audiences were watching more American content, it was simultaneously the case that American—and global audiences—were watching more European content. That had a net positive financial effect on European film and television industries, especially in smaller countries.

Gatekeepers and protectionists have reason to fear the democratization of film and TV; it leads to a loss of state and professional control of the industry, even if it is an overwhelming net positive for consumers and independent producers. But it is worth considering whether they have a point when they worry that televisual democratization reduces the quality of what is being produced. Perhaps the new movies and shows are just the lowest common denominator schlock, a degraded mockery of what was once art. One can gesture at the box office popularity of movie franchises, sequels, and remakes—from superheroes to space fantasies—and lament the decline of originality and artistry.

No one can dispute that a globalized industry produces films and TV in much greater quantity than before. The number of movies released each year in the United States nearly tripled between 2000 and 2016 (Figure 1). And as television distribution grew from just three networks in 1980 to more than 100 platforms by the 2010s, the number of new TV shows introduced each year more than quadrupled (Figure 2). We are swimming in an ocean of content.

Those are impressive quantities, but are the critics right about the degraded quality of the content? When Waldfogel tracked a popular measure of quality—the number of movies with a critic score of at least 90 percent “fresh” according to Rotten Tomatoes—he found that the number of well-regarded films released each year had exploded from 12 to 83 between 1998 and 2016 (Figure 3). User-generated IMDB scores followed suit, as did the number of Emmy awards given to streaming platforms and cable channels (Figure 4). Thus, by every metric—other than the personal taste of crotchety gatekeepers—increasing quantity also meant increasing the number of quality shows.

This makes sense on an intuitive level. After all, competition between studios and streaming platforms increases their willingness to take risks. When, for example, the remake of House of Cards became a sensation for Netflix, former Disney head Michael Eisner noted that if he had attempted to start a broadcast TV show in like fashion—with the anti-hero killing a neighbor’s dog—then he would have been fired within 10 minutes. As entertainment journalist Ben Fritz put it, “Shifting economic and technological factors have fueled an explosion of originality and risk taking.”

The biggest movies or splashiest shows aren’t the only winners. An academic study found that the shift from renting at physical stores to streaming and mail delivery—with their much larger catalogs of titles—made consumers “significantly more likely to rent niche titles relative to blockbusters.” Previously, almost half of all physical rentals were dedicated to the top 10 movies by revenue; afterward, that number fell to 11 percent. There is strong evidence that globalization and digitization simultaneously improved the quantity, quality, and breadth of consumption of the typical film and television consumer.

Consumers are enjoying an embarrassment of riches, but there are storm clouds on the horizon for the film and television industry, and not only for the lingering remnants of Old Hollywood. Total time spent watching movies and TV shows at home—including both broadcast and streaming platforms—peaked in the early 2010s at nearly nine hours per day and has fallen by about an hour a day since. What has replaced television time is user-created video content. After all, streaming platforms and cable channels once stole audience share from broadcast TV and movie theaters by multiplying the quantity and quality of alternative programming. Now it is streaming’s turn to face a new set of alternative platforms and substitutable content.

And whereas streaming and cable tripled the number of movies and quadrupled the number of TV shows released each year, it is small peanuts compared to the volume of televisual content that users are creating and uploading daily. Five hundred hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube per minute! If the average person were to try and drink from that firehose—even dedicating every waking minute to the task—they would only make it through 832 minutes, or about half a day’s worth of upload in one lifetime. And that does not include other platforms that host video content, from TikTok to Twitch.

Critics of social media, such as jazz reviewer Ted Gioia, dismiss user-created video as mere “distraction” that has replaced true “entertainment.” We are locked into a mindless, addictive, ceaseless cycle of swiping such that “even the dumbest [legacy] entertainment looks like Shakespeare” by comparison. Likewise, technologist Ted Keen calls social media a “dictatorship of idiots” over a system in which “ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Yet however discombobulating a fact it is for an older generation of elite cultural gatekeepers, the reality is that talent, knowledge, and insight are widely distributed. This conforms with the observation of economist F. A. Hayek about the distribution of expertise, although he applied his “Knowledge Problem” to the political economy rather than to the entertainment industry. Yet if it is true that, to quote Hayek, “the utilization of knowledge … is not given to anyone in its totality” and instead many individuals possess “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge,” then the democratization of art and entertainment is a thrilling opportunity. Or, to use vernacular popular among YouTube compilation videos, “Humans Are Awesome.” To quote author Neal Stephenson, “The results of the creative frenzy of millions of people are always more interesting than what a single person can think of,” no matter how brilliant the individual.

Consider, for example, how short-form video is transforming comedy into a more diverse artistic space featuring comedians from all over the globe. The most-followed TikTok account currently belongs to Khaby Lame, a Senegalese-Italian and former factory worker with over 162 million followers on TikTok who is known for his humorous expressions that have cross-cultural appeal. Humor is not the exclusive preserve of any one nationality or identity; comedic talent is widely distributed, and the democratization of cultural production allows more of that humor to find a global audience.

But this is not just a matter of the comedy industry transitioning between older and newer generations of professional comedians. Whether old school or new school, a comedian can spend months honing a tight five-minute set capable of bringing down the house but still not out-joke the aggregated humor of a globe’s worth of user-created content. An ordinary person might have come up with only a single joke or truly funny experience in their lifetime, but if even a fraction of billions of users come up with one such bon mot and then upload it to a platform where it can be algorithmically distributed, it is more than enough to create a continuous stream of crowd-sourced hilarity that surpasses the focused efforts of even the funniest professional comedian. Call it the humor of the crowd.

Increasingly, the distinctions between terms like “streaming,” “traditional TV,” and “user-created video” are blurring. The different platforms, once relatively distinct from each other in terms of the content they peddled, have been merging. Disney movies are now released on its streaming platform, Disney+. YouTube is now the largest provider of “broadcast” television programs, beating out streaming platform Hulu. As Ben Fritz notes, “The terminology we use for visual content is already antiquated, given how often we watch TV shows on devices other than TVs and view films without any cellophane in sight.”

But that blurring also has to do with the nature of the content itself. Communications theorist Michael Strangelove has described the rise of user-created, short-form video as a transition into a “post-television era.” But that framing assumes that there is a meaningful difference between film and television and the forms of video replacing them. Bear in mind that the development of these categories was rooted in historical circumstances. Early television was primarily financed by commercials and gradually optimized into 22 minutes of serialized “villain of the week” content with 8 minutes of ads. But that does not make those norms a universal or ahistorical constant.

This is why Netflix and other streaming platforms have found success in releasing entire seasons of a show all at once. This blurred the previously rigid differences between medium-length serialized content and longer, unitary movies. To quote Fritz again, a “Marvel ‘movie’ is … best understood as a two-hour episode of an ongoing television show, while one season of Fargo or American Crime Story is, essentially, an eight- or ten-hour film.” Similarly, there are often marginal differences between older genres of film and television and their online substitutes. What, in the end, is the great distinction between the old TV variety shows, like The Ed Sullivan Show, and daily YouTube channels like Good Mythical Morning, which features celebrity appearances, oddball games, and audience interaction? Ultimately, “the lines that divide these types of content will blur to non-existence.”

Yet as dramatic as the transformation of film and television has been over the past several decades, even greater changes may be in the works. Filmmaking tools using artificial intelligence (AI) promise not only to blur but to erase the line between creator and consumer. If the ultimate end of AI filmmaking is generating entire movies with a series of written prompts, then, in the words of Neal Stephenson, we are still in the “transistor-radio stage of AI.”

But filmmakers are already using AI tools to de-age actors, dub films into foreign languages, and quickly render visual effects. It is not hard to imagine a future in which, as actor and director Donald Glover put it in an advertisement for Google’s prompt-based video tools, “Everyone’s going to become a director. And everybody should be a director.” Of course, that is hyperbole in service of advertisement, but it is logical that further decreasing the costs of video creation would increase the number of people creating videos. It is a lesson that has been proven time and again by the advent of camcorders, editing software, and short-form video apps.

Regardless, the rise of streaming video and user-created content platforms has already decentered Hollywood studios and even the American film industry. Fully 80 percent of YouTube traffic comes from abroad. That has created a much more diverse televisual landscape while enabling “marginal, alternative, subcultural, and subaltern voices” to flourish. And despite the concerns of reactionary critics, the effect of this globalization has not been cultural homogeneity. Rather, in the words of anthropologist Richard Wilk, “We are not all becoming the same, but are portraying, dramatizing, and communicating our differences to each other in ways that are more widely intelligible.”

Thus, a show like Bluey, despite being intentionally Australian in orientation, has resonated with global audiences. One might object that the cultural distance between Australia and other former English colonies is not all that wide. But consider the success of Squid Game, a 2021 Korean-language drama—inspired by Japanese manga—about a fictional gameshow in which desperate contestants compete to the death to win a cash prize.

It is not an unchallenging show. The title is a reference to a traditional Korean children’s game, although the show was rated for mature audiences. Thematically, it critiques Korea’s state capitalist political economy over the past half-century. It is not the kind of content one would intuitively expect to perform well internationally. And yet, when Netflix released Squid Game, 111 million households watched it in its first month.

Then it caught the attention of Jimmy Donaldson, a YouTuber better known as “MrBeast,” who has over a quarter of a billion subscribers (the most in the world as of 2024 after surpassing the Hindi-language music video channel T‑Series). MrBeast is known for his lavish video productions—such as playing Battleship with real boats or spending 50 hours buried alive—that are created at Hollywood scale but from his small hometown of Greenville, North Carolina. Nothing about his biography—a college dropout with no formal film training—suggests mogul material. Yet, his expertise in gaming the YouTube algorithm has created an enterprise worth more than a billion dollars.

But MrBeast surpassed himself when he remade Squid Game in real life, featuring 456 contestants competing for a $456,000 prize. The 25-minute YouTube video has garnered 617 million views; for comparison, that is three times the number of people who bought tickets for Gone with the Wind, the highest-grossing movie of all time. MrBeast’s version of Squid Game stripped the story of its anti-capitalist messaging and thus encapsulated precisely the social behavior of which the Netflix show was a critique.

The story of Squid Game’s creation and re-creation is reminiscent of something Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen wrote dismissively of those who believed in the democratizing power of the internet. These optimists, Keen wrote, promise “an infinite market in which we cycle and recycle our cultural production to our hearts’ content.” Keen dismisses such pie-in-the-sky promises because he believes there is a “scarcity of talent, expertise, experience, and mastery in any given field.” But the success of Squid Game—a story repeatedly mixed and remixed, that hopped from Japanese manga to Korean show to North Carolina YouTube sensation, and that has perhaps been viewed by more than a billion people across all its iterations—offers a rebuke to the limited imaginations of those who are nostalgic for the days of a smaller film and TV industry, a smaller circle of creators and gatekeepers, and, ultimately, a smaller world.