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Far Out Magazine, 2025
Working in the film industry can often feel like being chained to a sinking ship. It used to be a place in which nearly anyone could find an entry-level job and work their way up, going from being a paper boy to a producer in a matter of months. Dreams were realised as quickly as they were formed, with Hollywood becoming a glittering beacon of hope in which you could add a star next to your name and become part of something bigger. Obviously, not everyone was allowed into its folds, with the industry operating on a strict boys club basis that also excluded nearly anyone who didn’t fit their very limited quota, but people are generally quite eager to brush over this part of its history, instead focusing on the years of moving pictures that changed things for the better.
In recent years, we have been told that the industry is far from what it used to be, but what this really means is that it has almost completely died. A few people are operating at the top and keeping the ship’s engine warm, with a steady influx of influencers and nepo babies who are waltzing in and filling the quota for new talent. New directors barely stand a chance, conglomerate studios are slowly taking over all avenues of creativity, and Hollywood now feels like a cesspit full of out-of-touch celebrities and greedy producers who wouldn’t know a good story if it hit them in the face.
Hollywood desperately needs to be taken down a peg or two, and it was for this reason that I was completely on board with Seth Rogen’s original Apple series The Studio, following a newly appointed studio executive as he tries to toe the line between commerce and art, all while being confronted with the harsh reality of how the film industry just isn’t what it used to be.
There’s a distinct undercurrent of melancholia throughout The Studio, with the show beginning as a hilarious comedy of errors as we watch Matt Rennick (played by Rogen) try to win the respect of the stars around him and create genuinely good films that will also make billions of dollars. However, while the show is undoubtedly a satire, and a very funny one at that, there are also many moments that hit any movie lover with a profound gut punch, because even if you love it, it’s still dying. This is particularly evident through the show’s final two episodes, with Matt being given the news that his beloved studio, Continental Studios, might be ‘MGM’d’ and sold to Amazon.
Rogen critiques many aspects of the current studio system, with episodes devoted to making fun of Hollywood’s approach to diversity, the absurdity of awards season and the sometimes insufferable stars who craft two-faced personas to conceal the vapidity of their true selves. However, while all of this is true, the show begins to divert from explicit comedy after the Golden Globe episode, ending on a bittersweet and vaguely depressing note as we see Rennick sitting alone in his limousine, confronted with the fact that he has devoted his life to something that he won’t be recognised for, shoved into the back of an empty car and glossed over as one of the many moving cogs behind the scenes.
While he is certainly overreacting in his disappointment at not being thanked, it touches on something painfully true about the industry as a whole, with it swallowing up your life and not always seeing the fruits you imagined it would bear. Matt is overreacting for the sake of satire, but as he sits alone in his car, you begin to feel the unfairness of a business that makes you feel invisible and as though your work will never truly matter. It will be sucked into a monstrous machine that is bigger than your involvement, forcing you to make decisions that distance you from your true self and the reason you’re there in the first place.
However, the shows creators leave us on a different note through the final episode, something that is tinged with optimism despite the impending disaster that looms over the Continental team. The prospect of being sold to a tech company is one that many studios have grappled with in real life, with the film industry becoming a capitalist machine that churns out films as though on a conveyor belt, with the pursuit of making art becoming a focus of the past.
The Studio ends on a cliffhanger that encapsulates both ends of this feeling, capturing the contradictory nature of working in Hollywood and the ways it forces you to become complicit with the machine, all while trying to break it apart. The team desperately try to execute a perfect presentation at CinemaCon that will prove to the investors that Continental is thriving and shouldn’t be sold. Naturally, nearly everything goes wrong in the buildup to the presentation, with the fate of the studio hanging in the balance as they scramble to create solutions to their laughable array of disasters.
But just as all hope seems lost, with the team having to pull off a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ manoeuvre on their studio head after an accidental overdose, there’s a glimmer of promise within the madness, with Matt encouraging the audience to chant “Movies! Movies! Movies!” to distract from Griffin’s state of inebriation. The episode ends on a close-up of Matt’s face as the chant grows louder, a smile spreading as he stands before the crowd.
The show has been renewed for a second season, and there is an abundance of systemic issues within Hollywood for Rogen to explore, but the final episode leaves us with many thoughts. While the central team can sometimes be completely inept and out-of-touch, it captures the madness and mayhem beneath the bowels of the ship and the chaos created to keep it running. The Studio both mocks these issues and Hollywood archetypes while making us feel sympathy for a dream that has been corrupted by the system. There is no doubt that Matt has achieved the life he always dreamt of, but during the first episode, he sadly reflects on the fact that while he loves movies, he has inadvertently been tasked with destroying them. It’s an impossible job, and perhaps one that cannot be done.
Given the overwhelmingly capitalist infrastructure of the modern film industry, any position of power in Hollywood would be borderline torturous for any genuine cinephile. I would argue that the people at the very top are only able to ‘succeed’ (I say that in the broadest sense of the word) because they don’t love movies – it’s all just profit and product. But the true tragedy of The Studio lies in just how hostile the industry is to those who truly love film. If you love it wholeheartedly, which Matt clearly does, your dream will destroy you after reaching it, because it no longer exists in the way it used to.
And it is this idea that takes over in that final episode. Despite the pandemonium of Matt’s experiences leading up to CinemaCon, as we slowly watch him lose touch with the hope he had and his faith in cinema as a whole, we see a flicker of this being restored as he watches a crowd light up in their unanimous love for the medium, joining in on a rebellious chant that holds a finger up to these parasitic tech companies who threaten the future of the business he loves. Matt’s face is one of defiance, because despite the very little that’s left of the film industry, he seems to gain just enough steam to keep the ship afloat, and briefly reconnects with the love that got him there in the first place.