RLM: Right for the Wrong Reasons

Red Letter Media recently released a video lamenting Hollywood’s disastrous 2025 box office numbers. As usual, they’re cutting, observant, and funny in a Gen Y “pushing the envelope in a safe direction” way. But they also misunderstand what’s happening—and why, despite all the dooming, it’s good news.

And it’s not that Hollywood is having a bad year. It’s not even in a slump. The industry is collapsing. What we’re witnessing is not a temporary hiccup; it’s structural failure. The scaffold is coming down, and the audience ain’t coming back.

Mike and Jay, like many borderline Pop Cultists, are reacting as if this downturn is a fluke. They think the industry can recover if it “gets back to basics.” Their call for better scripts, real actors, and actual directors instead of algorithmically generated slop and Death Cult ritual cant is a decade too late.

It’s kind of tragic for them, because their advice is well-meant. They want the studio system to rediscover the art of making movies people care about.

But here’s the hard truth: that Hollywood is gone, and it’s never coming back.

Related: Why Hollywood’s Collapse Is Inevitable: What It Means for Entertainment’s Future

The Red Letter crew is nostalgic for a system that worked when it had to. That was back when the studios had to strive against competition for audience attention. Loyal readers know that’s not today’s Hollywood. The current system is a skinsuit zombie glued together with Marvel VFX, tax subsidies, and ESG cash infusions.

Therein lies the problem: You can’t fix a corpse.

Mike and Jay make the same mistake most critics fall into: They assume the system’s purpose is to make movies. That’s where they’re wrong. The system’s purpose is to extract capital while enforcing ideological compliance. Cinematic artistry is incidental. That’s why all you see is milking phase cutouts pumped out with factory monotony. It’s all product engineered to appease shareholders, not entertain audiences.

That’s why today’s cinema is derivative, boring, and expensive. It’s also why nobody is going to theaters anymore. The public has finally learned there’s nothing worth seeing.

Related: Hollywood’s Hate Mail to its Own Audience

In their video, RLM talk about “box office fatigue” as if audiences have gotten tired of movies as a whole. That’s like saying a man who stops eating poisoned food is suffering from “meal fatigue.” People want to be entertained. They’re just done being insulted.

And that’s the real white pill: The collapse of Hollywood isn’t a crisis. It’s an opportunity. The factory model of entertainment is breaking, and that opens the door to a better model—a human model.

Independent creators now have access to the same digital tools that used to be locked up in studio sweat shops. Distribution is global. Fanbases form organically online. You don’t need a casting couch, a Starbucks pitch meeting, or a briefcase full of coke anymore. If you’re talented and willing to work, you can build your own audience.

And that fact terrifies the old guard. It’s why they’ve flooded YouTube with bots and replaced screenwriters with A.I. It’s why Netflix is hemorrhaging money. The gatekeepers are working furiously to chain the gates; meanwhile, the peasants are starting to realize that the walls are falling down.

To their credit, Red Letter Media have built one of the most successful movie review brands in the world. And they did it without help from the studios. But they don’t seem to realize that their own success is the clearest sign of Hollywood’s failure. They’re already part of the future; they just haven’t internalized that fact.

The studios are collapsing. Let them fall. They spat on their audience, strip mined beloved IPs, and tried to pass off agitprop as art. Now Cultural Ground Zero has caught up, the audience has left, and the suits are standing alone in the crater.

Don’t mourn Hollywood. Because real entertainment is already rising from its ashes.

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