I know…it’s hard to look back at what happened to Hollywood in 2025 and not be alarmed by the swift acceleration of its years-long decline. One of the original movie studios, Paramount, was finally offloaded to a Silicon Valley oligarch for just $8 billion, a fraction of its worth only five years ago. A second of the five remaining studios, Warner Bros., will either be ingested by its once-dismissed tech rival Netflix in one of the iciest revenge moves in media history—maybe since the ever-spiteful Barry Diller bought People magazine nearly 50 years after it threatened to out him as gay?—or sold to that same oligarch so he and his son can gleefully fire thousands of people, including many they just inherited from the first studio. With the vast majority of traditional content companies downsizing, signs of the now-familiar “secular decline” are all over town, from the dormant production facilities to the rolling talent agency layoffs to how easy it is to get a 1 p.m. reservation at Nerano or The Grill.