“Storytelling Isn’t Broken – We Are”: Michael Cioni’s Wake-Up Call to Hollywood

Industry Insights

by Nino LeitnerOctober 27^th, 2025

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In a presentation to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, Strada founder and CEO Michael Cioni delivered a sobering update on Hollywood’s trajectory (after his initial talk earlier in the year). The problem, he argues, isn’t storytelling, audience demand, or even AI – it’s a collective refusal to evolve. Hollywood’s sunk-cost mindset, he warns, is pulling the industry down while creators move faster, freer, and more profitably than ever before. Is Hollywood broken?

Eight months after his original data-driven analysis at the Hollywood Professional Association (here’s our article on that), Michael Cioni from Strada returned with fresh numbers and a tougher message. Despite rising global production spend and steady streaming growth, on-set work hours have collapsed to a thirty-year low. Empty stages dot the studios of Los Angeles. “If storytelling isn’t broken,” he asked, “why are so many people out of work?”

The answer, he said, lies in the sunk cost fallacy: an instinct to keep pouring time, money, and reputation into legacy systems simply because they’ve existed for so long.

Check out Michael’s second talk here:

Hollywood’s anchor: the sunk cost fallacy

Cioni likened Hollywood’s outdated workflows to an anchor on a cruise ship—dragging the industry down while the world sails ahead. The habit of defending infrastructure, networks, and tools built over decades prevents meaningful change. “We keep diving back into the same techniques and ideology,” he said, “even when the model is shifting from underneath our feet.”

To survive, he urged, the industry must look at data with “sober eyes.” Audiences are not disappearing, and neither is investment. What’s broken is the tempo—the speed at which stories are made and delivered compared to the audiences consuming them.

The middle class of creativity is collapsing

Cioni places the creative middle class – the producers, cinematographers, editors, and craftspeople who make most films and shows – at the heart of the crisis. Studios and financiers, he said, have a duty to make business decisions that sustain this workforce. Yet the data tells a grim story: a 37% year-over-year decline in total production, and the lowest shooting hours since 1995.

“Some of my friends worked more during the pandemic than in 2025,” he noted. “We’ve built more capacity than there’s demand to fill it.” The infrastructure is overbuilt, and the workforce is underutilized.

The rise of autonomy – and the new power structure

The power has shifted to creators, Cioni said, because autonomy beats legacy. The creator economy now commands the kind of attention and income once reserved for major studios. Platforms like YouTube, Patreon, and Spotify reward performance, not seniority or union scale.

“YouTube has paid over $70 billion to creators,” he noted. “They’ve made millions of millionaires – all people making their own rules.”

What Hollywood once achieved through gatekeeping and red carpets, creators now accomplish with direct fan engagement. “They don’t follow the rules,” Cioni said. “They make the rules.”

AI is not the enemy – bad business models are

When critics blame artificial intelligence for the industry’s decline, Michael Cioni pushes back. “Nothing that’s happening to our industry right now is because of AI,” he said. From crowd simulations in Lord of the Rings to face tracking in color grading, AI has been part of filmmaking for decades.

Generative AI, meanwhile, faces its own flaw: a broken business model. Its reliance on expensive, consumption-based compute makes it inherently unsustainable. “Once you ask customers to pay for every interaction,” Cioni said, “they realize they don’t need it that badly.”

And even if the tech improves, he added, Hollywood shouldn’t panic – because AI excels at short, low-precision content. “We build long, complex, emotionally coherent stories,” he said. “That’s not what AI does well.”

Is generative video AI really not going to be a threat for Hollywood?

While I think Michael is right with his assessment about generative AI at the present time – I have to disagree with him looking forward: If you think about the rapid advancements with generative images and video within the last years, or even the last months, it’s clear to me that it will become a threat to Hollywood sooner than later. The consistency problem is currently being worked out with technologies like Veo 3.1, and when we talk about the cost that is currently associated with generating video, I believe that this will be solved for two reasons:

One, models are becoming better to control in terms of what outcome we can expect (results are less random), resulting in less repeated processing necessary.

And two, Moore’s Law applies here too. Within the next few years, the cost of generation will shrink exponentially while the quality (resolution, detail) will increase at the same time. So even if there currently is an AI bubble (I certainly believe there is), even after it pops, it will come down to a reasonable price to do video generations consistently.

Three steps to rebuild a broken Hollywood

Michael closed with a practical roadmap for reinvention—one that blends Hollywood’s infrastructure with the creator economy’s agility.

1. Join them, don’t expect them to join us

Partnership, not absorption, is the key. Executives and studios must embed themselves inside creator-led ecosystems rather than trying to invite creators “up” to Hollywood. Traditional leaders joining creator-driven companies, he said, are already showing how this can work.

2. Rethink the production economy

Tax incentives help, but they cannot fix a broken business model. The industry should learn from the creator economy’s performance-based compensation, where success is rewarded directly and transparently. “There aren’t enough tax credits in the world to overcome bad decisions,” Cioni said.

3. Rebuild infrastructure for the new workforce

He envisions a move toward infrastructure-as-a-service – studio campuses that offer integrated sets, lights, cameras, and post-production spaces ready for creators to use instantly. Instead of renting an empty stage for six months, facilities should provide complete, flexible environments designed for multi-hyphenate creators.

The hardest truth: right-sizing the industry

Michael Cioni acknowledged the emotional toll of contraction. “I don’t have to read about people who haven’t worked in a year – I have dinner with them,” he said. The imbalance between supply and demand requires painful correction, but without it, the middle-class creative workforce will erode further.

He compared it to nature’s balance between wolves and caribou: survival depends on sacrifice. “We’ve been living large for so long that we’ve forgotten how to right-size,” he warned.

The next golden age starts in garages

Michael ended with cautious optimism. The next wave of storytelling, he said, won’t emerge from studio lots– it’s already happening “in a million garages.” The tools, platforms, and audiences are all there. The question is whether Hollywood will evolve fast enough to rejoin them.

“What scares me,” he concluded, “isn’t knowing what’s happening – it’s realizing that storytelling is transforming faster than we are.”

Storytelling, Cioni insists, isn’t broken – it’s evolving faster than the institutions around it. The choice for Hollywood is clear: evolve with the creator economy or risk becoming history.

Will Hollywood finally learn to match the agility of creators before its best talent decides not to come back? Or is Hollywood broken? Let us know in the comments.