The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck

If you’re planning on attending Tom Rothman’s birthday party in November, you’ll need a costume. Rumor has it the Sony chairman is asking invitees to dress up as characters from movies made under his reign. Luckily, it’s a long list of wardrobe choices, stretching back a multitude of decades. You could go as Jack Dawson from 1997’s Titanic. Or Satine from 2001’s Moulin Rouge! Or Miranda Priestly from 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. Or Rick Dalton from 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The point here is, Rothman is turning 70 and has been in charge at Sony (and before that, Fox) for a very, very long time.

As it happens, he’s not the only silver mogul in Hollywood these days. Bob Iger is 73 and has been running Disney off and on for nearly 20 years. Ari Emanuel, 63, has been running WME for nearly 30 years, since he started his agency in 1995 (after leaving CAA, the company co-founded by then-28-year-old Michael Ovitz in 1975). Jeremy Zimmer, 66, has been running UTA for more than 30 years, since he co-founded that agency in 1991. Michael De Luca is a relative spring chicken at 59, but he’s been fronting studio slates — at New Line, MGM, Amazon and Warner Bros. — for three decades. 

Many of these no-longer-so-young Turks are now old enough to qualify for AARP discounts. But few of them seem in any huge rush to retire.

And that’s the problem. Or at least it is for a new generation of ambitious show-business strivers under the age of 50 who find themselves unhappily stuck on the middle rungs of Hollywood’s corporate ladder. Unlike their bosses, some of whom ascended to the heights of authority in their 30s (Emanuel) and even their late 20s (De Luca), young professionals today — who are toiling in an industry plagued with title deflation and ever-diminishing paydays — see no clear path to the top. Not one that isn’t blocked by an all-powerful boomer who’s been perched in a corner office since the Bush administration. The first one.

“These people have been making movies since the 1990s,” notes one 50-something former head of production. “That’s a long time to have a position of authority and to be a gatekeeper of cultural decisions.”

“It’s become so fucking depressing,” agrees a veteran agent, also in his 50s. “Even 10 years ago, executives were like movie stars. They were making tons of movies and were empowered to be bold and do cool things. Now, most executives can’t even hire writers without asking their boss.”

Of course, a lot of these bosses are still bosses for good reasons. Rothman, for one, can hog credit for more than 150 Oscar nominations for movies made during his long tenure at Sony. Many of these sexagenarians have built empires from the ground up, guided their companies through mergers, spinoffs and acquisitions, and have skillfully steered their workforces through an ever-revolving series of corporate overlords. They’ve not only proved they have staying power — they’ve proved there’s power in staying.

Still, fair or not, there’s a mounting resentment among young (or young-er) Hollywood. Speaking (mostly off the record) with studio executives, producers, agents, assistants — dozens of entertainment industry professionals ranging from their 20s to their 60s — there’s a wide consensus that the kids aren’t alright. Many younger execs feel they’re spinning their wheels, going nowhere — and not even particularly fast — with increasing numbers abandoning Hollywood altogether and decamping for careers in other trades (like, gasp, data analytics). 

Obviously, there are myriad reasons for the malaise gripping the town — the lingering aftereffects of the pandemic, the industry-wide economic shrinkage, the labor unrest, the waves and waves of layoffs. But a lot of young executives also are casting weary glances at the aging eminences who’ve been occupying Hollywood’s C-suites seemingly forever. 

The time has come, you can all but hear them rumbling, to start handing out gold watches.

***

You’re a 37-year-old mid-level studio exec. You wake up in Hollywood in the year of our Bryan Lourd, 2024. From bed, you check your email and find the latest gloomy blasts from the trades: another 15 percent staff reduction at Paramount Global, and Disney is planning about 300 more layoffs. There’s also an email from a former exec you used to do business with, and you almost scroll past it, at first not recognizing their personal Gmail. Lately, there have been a lot of emails from personal accounts as people shed their corporate addresses or, more likely, as those corporations shed them. 

This one is a victim from one of the layoffs that happened three or six months prior, you can’t remember which, but you are confident that the quarterly earnings report claimed profitability. They are hoping to take you out to coffee in their latest go around town to see if anywhere is hiring. You thought you had heard they went into real estate, but it must have been someone else. You’ve considered jumping careers yourself, even researched a couple of grad schools, but that was before they finally gave you the promotion they had been talking about since before the strikes. The pay bump wasn’t what you imagined, but you got equity. Or was it that they traded some of your salary for stock? It doesn’t matter, you are barely making what it takes to afford the mortgage on the $1.2 million median home price in Los Angeles County, but it convinced you to hang on for another year. Sunk cost is supposed to be a fallacy, but what do you know? You didn’t get past the home screen for that online MBA program.

You are fast approaching 40, living the current reality of the Hollywood dream, and you just want to go back to bed.

Of course, it was not always this way. Back in 1986, the Los Angeles Times ran a story headlined “Baby Mogul Running Fast for Fox.” It was about a 28-year-old whiz kid — maybe you’ve heard of him, Scott Rudin? — who had just taken over as president of production at 20th Century Fox, where he was overseeing releases like Ron Howard’s Big and the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. The story laid out the ages of the other heads of the then-eight major Hollywood studios, including Disney’s chairman, Jeff Katzenberg, who was just 35 at the time. And that was Katzenberg’s second job as studio chief; he’d been all of 31 when he got hired to run Paramount. The median age of the presidents of production of the majors in 1986 was 35.

“They were who I had in my head when I started in Hollywood,” says a current studio executive in his 50s of these former wunderkinds. “Now that I’ve got here, it’s the worst time to have this job.”

Less than a decade after Rudin took over at Fox, De Luca bested him by a year, getting hired at age 27 as New Line’s president of production in 1993. De Luca didn’t have greenlight authority back then, but he had the next best thing — the ear and backing of New Line chairman Bob Shaye. “I walked into [Shaye’s office] with a 170-page epic on porn in the ’70s and a guy with a 13-inch penis,” De Luca once recalled his pitch for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. “And he was fine with it.”

Today, it’s hard to imagine any 20-something having that kind of clout in Hollywood. Or even a 30-something. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine De Luca, now co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, greenlighting a Boogie Nights-like screenplay brought to him by an underling. According to younger execs, that’s precisely what’s wrong with the industry in 2024: It’s still being run by the same people who ran it in 1994.

“You look at Mike De Luca, who goes from MGM to Amazon over to Warner Bros. You look at Tom Rothman, who goes from Fox to Sony. These same people are being recycled, and because they’re being recycled, there’s less opportunity for the people under them to be given a shot,” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts (and a former THR editor). “And giving them a shot now seems high-risk.”

It’s not just graying studio chiefs who are stubbornly clinging to their jobs; the layers of execs beneath them — the executive vps and those under them, and also those under them — also are sticking in jobs for longer. Who can blame them? Right now, there aren’t a whole lot of other jobs out there. Meanwhile, the cost of retirement continues to rise, especially for those accustomed to a certain Hollywood lifestyle. People are living longer; health care and home care have never been more expensive. There’s every reason to stay put, if you can.

“The challenges in sustaining yourself in Hollywood have become greater,” notes a 50-something producer. “So, you hold on for dear life.” 

The word a lot of folks in the business banter about is “contraction.” But what comes right after is in some ways an even scarier word: “stagnation.”

***

If the upshot of all this were merely the shattered career dreams of a bunch of Gen X and millennial movie executives, this story probably wouldn’t have been written. But the implications for the film business — and for the wider cinematic culture — are actually pretty profound, at least according to many of the Gen X and millennial movie executives with whom THR spoke. 

“It’s a massive problem that the people in power are so far away from Gen Z,” says a mid-30s producer. “They show up for movies when they have something that speaks to them, but whenever they happen upon something that appeals to Gen Z, it feels like they just stepped on a rake.” 

“You get to a point where you’re living in your beautiful house in the hills, you’re meeting only other wealthy people and you’re not connecting to the audience,” adds Galloway. “And the moviegoing audience is primarily young, so at a certain point you become really detached from them.”

Which explains why so much of what Hollywood is producing these days feels so familiar. For instance, there are currently remakes or sequels in development for ’80s classics like An Officer and a Gentleman, Ghost and Dirty Dancing — projects that have little or no emotional resonance to anyone under 50. Obviously, remakes have long been a studio staple. But a War of the Roses redo? A new Running Man offering? It’s unclear whether these nostalgia plays will be all that appealing even to people over 50. Meanwhile, younger executives, especially from underrepresented communities, are navigating studios that are still overwhelmingly white and male, and finding it increasingly difficult to get attention for projects outside of a four-quadrant family film. “[Studios] hired all these mission-driven people of color who now can’t make their passion projects,” says one 30-something agent. “Now, everyone wants Yellowstone.” 

“Boomers tend to value their own opinions, and they all validate each other,” says a studio executive in their 40s. “They built these systems to just take care of each other. There is no trust with anyone other than themselves.”

To be fair, it’s not just boomer bosses who are distrustful these days. There’s been a general trend toward top-down management at many of the studios and even streamers, and it has little to do with age. Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria — who is only 53 — has sat in on humble pitch meetings, something that used to be considered well below her title’s pay grade. As the industry contracts — and stagnates — it becomes more and more risk-averse, with those in charge hoarding their power rather than sharing it with fresh talent coming up through the ranks, in essence starving the next generation of the experience necessary to grow beyond their current titles. (Also, for that matter, starving the town of personality.) “The business used to be a little more batshit crazy,” notes a former production president. “Everyone used to be a lunatic. Now it feels a little more polite. A little more suit-y. Not that people are wearing suits.”

Stapler-throwing aside, Hollywood’s more freewheeling ways did tend to yield extraordinary content. Film executives used to make their mark by championing idiosyncratic projects, sometimes putting their careers on the line to do so, then using that win — if there was one — to catapult themselves to their next title or another studio. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. In the age of the plug-and-play franchise, it’s become harder for executives to stand out. And even when they do, it doesn’t always guarantee a promotion. For instance, Nathan Samdahl, the production exec who brought in and oversaw the original horror film Smile, was laid off at Paramount Global in a 2022 cost-cutting effort — just before the movie went on to become one of the studio’s most profitable of the year. (Samdahl eventually found a new home at Walter Hamada’s production banner.)

Stagnation, of course, isn’t just rough on those in first class; turbulence is always worse at the back of the plane. The old route to mogul used to start in the mail room — where Emanuel began his journey — but these days even landing a junior job is a lot harder than it used to be. Galloway notes that Chapman University’s career center has clocked a dip of 30 percent in entry-level gigs over the past year. Those few lucky enough to snag an assistant gig often find themselves working even longer hours than their predecessors did, assigned to multiple desks, earning somewhere between $21 to $25 an hour with lessening chances of advancement.

All this career inertia isn’t just bad for Hollywood’s younger workforce. In the long run, it’s bad for the future of the business. In fact, it’s potentially deadly. It means that someday, maybe soon, there won’t be anybody left in Hollywood’s dwindling workforce who’ll have a clue about how to run a set. Or a slate. Or a studio.

Says one 50-something former studio exec of the looming brain-drain crisis, “It’s an existential threat.”

What’s the way forward? How do we find our way out of this stagnation quagmire? Maybe Hollywood, never one for original ideas on or off the screen, should look backward, to the earliest days of the film business. One role model for yesterday’s whiz kid turned today’s silver mogul might be David O. Selznick, who became RKO’s head of production in 1931, at age 29, went on to make Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound, A Star Is Born and a slew of other enduring classics, then abruptly stopped making movies and functionally retired in 1948 because, as he put it, “I was tired.”

He was 46. 

This story appeared in the Oct. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.