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Hollywood survival strategies in the post-COVID 19 era
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Hollywood survival strategies in the post-COVID 19 era

Michael Johnson
Humanities & social sciences communications, v 8(1)
21 Apr 2021
url
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00776-z.pdfView
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open
url
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00776-zView
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Arts & Humanities Arts & Humanities - Other Topics Humanities, Multidisciplinary Social Sciences - Other Topics Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
Since the arrival of the Coronavirus in the United States, Americans have been forced to quarantine themselves at home in dramatic fashion, unlike almost any other time in the nation's history. Moreover, the American workforce has been equally impacted by virtue of state-imposed shutdowns that have affected innumerable businesses, including the Hollywood entertainment industry, which is the subject of this research. I examine how commercial entertainment conglomerates like AT&T, Comcast, Disney, ViacomCBS, and Fox have responded to mandatory closures for businesses that employ a human workforce upon whom they rely for their labor, and to human consumers they seek to distribute their film and television commodities to for profit. Using historical and discourse analyses in a political economic theoretical framework, I review contemporary reports about the economic conditions which have influenced the industry's technological adaptation and innovation and argue that the Hollywood television and film industries will capitalize upon this current public health crisis as a motivator to adopt streaming platforms as the new preferred distribution mechanism of entertainment long after COVID 19 is a memory. This qualitative research examines the technological adaptations employed by these entertainment conglomerates to analyze (1) how the transition to streaming video on demand has occurred, and evaluates (2) what the adoption of these survival strategies mean for Hollywood's long-term economic future and survival in a "digitally competitive" (Smith and Telang, 2017) marketplace.

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15 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being

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Web of Science research areas
Humanities, Multidisciplinary
Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
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