By Blake Cain, Senior Entertainment Collapse Correspondent
May 8, 2025
Welcome to Development Hell — a recurring dispatch from the scorched earth of the entertainment industry. This series follows the slow-motion collapse of Hollywood from the inside: the ghosted gigs, the vanished budgets, the C-suite cashouts, and the freelancers left behind.
Vol 1: The Decade the Freelancers Starved begins, as all good tragedies do, with a chart.
In 2024, while the entertainment industry bled out quietly across the country, a tidy list made the rounds — The Hollywood Reporter’s CEO pay chart — a neat little monument to the extraction at the top — one that doesn’t even register the John Malones of the world. On paper, it’s just compensation: millions in salary, equity, bonuses. In reality, it’s a blueprint for looting.
David Zaslav pulled in $39.3 million. Bob Iger took home $31.6 million. Ted Sarandos was just shy of $50 million. And Ari Emanuel, for all the noise, was listed at $18.1 million — but cashed a $173 million check when Silver Lake took Endeavor private.
These aren’t men leading a recovery. They’re the ones dismantling the entertainment industry and selling it off for parts, one tax write-off at a time — except, of course, for Sarandos, who has had a big hand in reshaping the business, and Ari, who believes that AI will leave us all with money and time to burn on live events… but traditional media, not so much. And while their bank accounts swell, the people who actually made their media empires possible — with their labor, the people who have done the actual work — have been intentionally starved out of the business.
This didn’t start last year. The rot was already in the pipes.
By 2022, you could feel it. The budgets got smaller, the meetings got weirder, the jobs got scarcer. The pipeline didn’t collapse all at once — it just began to constrict, inch by inch, until it wasn’t a pipeline at all, just a trickle of freelance gigs and Hail Mary pitch zooms that led nowhere. Then came the strikes.
And the executives? They played dumb. Acted like it was a freak disruption. But it wasn’t a disruption. It was their opportunity — to shut off production entirely, freeze spending, let the clock run out on deals, cancel slates, cut departments, and take the tax loss — shelving finished projects like Batgirl and Throupled from HBO Max… or, what was Zas calling it in 2022? It wasn’t just union hardball. It was a full-blown attempt to reset the terms of engagement — not just with labor, but with the very concept of creative work.
By 2023, the phone stopped ringing — and it hasn’t started again since.
Because they’re not trying to fix Hollywood.
They’re not trying to preserve the middle.
They’re trying to clear the board.
Can we estimate the real economic damage? Most entertainment workers were never officially fired — just quietly shut out.
The real numbers are buried in the freelance collapse: the editors who haven’t had a union job in two years, the casting producers who’ve left the industry entirely, the story teams living off credit cards, the line producers trying to reframe their résumés for tech jobs they don’t want.
The studio system died over fifty years ago, but what replaced it — the gig-fueled, deal-hustling, deadline-driven madness that powered television’s golden age and unscripted’s explosion — still worked, for a while. Until the people in charge figured out they could wring more money out of collapse than creation.
Maybe nobody embodies that more than Ari Emanuel.
What did Ari do with his windfall? He sat ringside at UFC 314, grinning like a man who just sold the last lightbulb in town. We covered it.
There he was — whispering sweet nothings to Trump, Dana White, Joe Rogan, and the rest of the Testosterone Trust — the moneyed meatheads shaping America’s cultural decline, one head kick at a time. You could call them the Octagon Oligarchs, the Grunt-Industrial Complex, the Ringside Regime, or the Post-Fact Fight Club. Doesn’t matter. The checks all cash the same.
Zaslav, meanwhile, is still out here playing Cromwell, at the behest of John Malone — torching the fields and calling it reform. (And yes, we’re fine naming John Malone twice.) He didn’t just cut jobs. He didn’t just gut departments. He took a flame thrower to Warner’s future and called it “strategic clarity.” He’s not leading a studio. He’s executing a slow-motion siege.
There’s a lot of talk now about “pivoting,” about AI tools and creator platforms and “owning your audience.” And yeah — we’ll do what we’ve always done. Adapt. Reinvent. Hustle harder than anyone. Hell, I’m here, doing this. But let’s not pretend this is the natural rhythm of a shifting industry.
This isn’t just a bad year. It’s becoming a lost decade. The slowdown started in 2022, deepened during the strikes, and now stretches into 2025 with no real sign of recovery. The work didn’t come back. The calls didn’t start again. The damage wasn’t temporary — it’s structural, and it’s ongoing. And now Trump thinks that tariffs on overseas media are going to right the ship? Can we please just cut to the 25th Amendment already?
It’s not just New York, Atlanta, Burbank, Hollywood, Venice, and Echo Park — even entertainment types in Malibu are hurting. A friend of mine in Malibu does a little notary work on the side. Since the strikes, he says a certain kind of customer has been showing up more often: entertainment folks coming down from the hills to pull money out of their retirement accounts. Not to invest. Not to bridge a deal. Just to get by. Nobody talks about it. They sign the papers, nod politely, and disappear back into the canyons. You don’t need a press release to know the town is bleeding — you just need to watch who shows up with a 401(k) and a forced smile.
Some of us are still here, trying to make it work. A lot of us aren’t. I’m seeing writers, directors, editors, showrunners, story producers — people with long, impressive résumés — move into real estate, insurance, logistics. Not because they stopped believing in the work, but because the industry stopped believing in them.
And the rest of us? We’re just hoping to stay afloat long enough to remember why we gave everything to this business in the first place.
Filed from the shadow of the Cinerama Dome, waiting for the lights to come back on.
