(Photo Illustration by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
In 2024’s brutal reset for the entertainment industry, the slogan for too many in Hollywood and beyond was “survive until 2025.” Well, 2025 is finally here. What can the remaining survivors look forward to in the year ahead?
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency is expected to end four years of tight regulatory oversight (if not overreach, by some critics’ assessments), setting free the animal spirits repressed amid post-Peak Streaming pullbacks, strikes and other complications. A vibrant deal-making scene is indeed likely, but as I explain below, some caveats may slow those spirits from running totally amok.
It’s fitting that ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence app from OpenAI, pushed Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming-video app Max from Apple’s list of 2024’s most downloaded iPhone programs. AI is indeed looming over many parts of entertainment business and creative output.
Meanwhile, all the streaming-video apps were considerably less central to media consumption, on phones in particular, than e-commerce apps such as Shein and Temu, Chinese apps that specialize in selling dirt-cheap everything. Hollywood’s output is just less central than it used to be, especially to younger audiences.
Elsewhere, another Chinese app likely survives an existential challenge; sports goes femme and global, theaters don’t recover from their funk, and large institutions of many kinds struggle to adapt to a fracturing audience and culture. Herewith, what to expect in media and entertainment in 2025:
- Mergers & acquisitions reshape the Hollywood landscape, eventually. Yes, once the Trump administration gets its people in place at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, typically a months-long process, M&A should escalate. Studio executives say they’re excited to do deals. But they also must contend with significant distractions tapping the brakes on any immediate dealmaking: Warner Bros. Discovery is still juggling $40 billion in debt; Comcast is putting most of its cable networks into SpinCo, an acquisition-ready standalone that can’t start other deals until 2026 for tax reasons; Disney and Fox leaders are focused on succession fights; Paramount Global is merging with David Ellison’s Skydance Entertainment, with massive cuts already lurching forward. Netflix, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple all have better, easier ways to spend a few billion dollars. That said, WBD likely will offload ratings-challenged political liability CNN, while positioning other cable operations for, most likely, a private-equity-fueled rollup with SpinCo or other companies’ cable operations. WBD’s remaining studio and streaming operations will be a tasty treat for some buyer, but who gets to be CEO may hold up any deal.
- YouTube grows its lead as most-watched streaming service. Even more than Netflix, YouTube is the most-watched service, with nearly 11 percent of all TV viewers. That’s more viewers than any streaming service, though Disney’s sprawling collection of broadcast, cable and streaming operations combined outstrips everyone. Expect YouTube’s lead to keep growing alongside increasingly high-quality programming that entices viewers to stick around even longer, even in the living room.
- Roku becomes a hot M&A candidate as advertising shifts online. With more than 80 million households and a thriving ad-supported Roku Channel throwing off cash, Roku should be a giant M&A target. Just look at why Walmart bought Vizio. Hint, it wasn’t for the perfectly solid TVs Vizio makes; it was for Vizio’s deep audience data and advertising/marketing opportunities. Meanwhile, streaming-focused ad powerhouses such as The Trade Desk (which is developing its own streaming-video software platform) are positioned for huge growth. That’s bad news for traditional broadcast and cable, or even the Upfronts, where they sell most of their ads each year.
- TikTok stays open. The clock is, um, ticking on U.S. legislation requiring closure or divestiture of TikTok in one of its biggest markets as soon as Jan. 19. Expect Joe Biden to exercise an option that pushes the deadline into the Trump Administration. Trump, meanwhile, has warmed to TikTok’s uses in reaching younger voters, and its competitive challenge to Meta’s Instagram and Facebook. He’s asking the Supreme Court to bail him out by tossing out the closure bill on First Amendment grounds, regardless of national-security concerns. If Trump’s Plan A doesn’t work out, expect TikTok to become part of Trump’s larger negotiating portfolio with the Chinese over tariffs, trade, hacking, and the rest. But TikTok likely survives in the United States, in some fashion.
- Big news organizations take a pounding. Salaries for on-air talent are plummeting, forcing even popular faces to choose between leaving or getting less. Both NBC’s Hoda Kotb and CBS’ Norah O’Donnell are departing in January, while many others are lucky if they keep their job and pay rate. Spinouts will challenge the finances of MSNBC, CNBC and CNN amid plummeting post-election ratings that have yet to bounce back. And Trump, fresh off a $15 million libel settlement from ABC, is suing news organizations left and (occasionally) right, including a dubious consumer-fraud lawsuit against the Des Moines Register over its election polling. On the print/digital side, the Washington Post is reorganizing under uninspiring new leadership after losing tens of millions of dollars annually during Jeff Bezos’ ownership. Similar pullbacks are hitting Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times. The good news? Low-cost niche news organizations, especially on the conservative side, have leveraged more market space and tech capabilities to build sustainable businesses amid an atomizing audience base.
- The year’s biggest entertainment release will be a videogame. If Grand Theft Auto VI actually debuts in the fall, it will be massive, as in multi-billion-dollars massive. Predecessor GTA 5 has generated an estimated $8.6 billion since it debuted way back in 2013, on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Two generations of consoles later, GTA 6 will outstrip anything coming out of Hollywood.
- The theater business will struggle. Domestic box office grosses in 2024 ended up down 4.6 percent from even a strike-addled 2024, at roughly $8.5 billion. That’s despite summer record-setters such as Disney’s Deadpool & Wolverine and Inside Out 2 and holiday hits such as Wicked, Moana 2 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Way more sequels are set for 2025, driving business, if not heartfelt fervor. The number of releases remains way down from the industry’s late-2010s heyday, per-screen averages way up, suggesting fewer big hits are carrying most of the load. Regardless, ever-higher ticket prices won’t push 2025 box-office totals past the pre-pandemic era’s annual average of more than $11 billion. Is something fundamentally, permanently broken in theatrical exhibition? Probably. We’ll find out a lot more in 2025. Or is Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos right: spending tens of millions of dollars on a theatrical release and marketing push is a dumb way to try to own the cultural zeitgeist in an fractured era.
- Netflix goes hard on live streaming, including more big-name sports. The first Netflix Christmas Day NFL games (and Beyoncé halftime concert) drew an average 25 million viewers with few reported glitches, a substantial success with the most popular programming on linear TV. Expect way more such ventures in the coming year from the streaming giant. Next Monday, WWE Raw debuts live on Netflix, featuring what WWE executive Nick Khan calls “family-friendly, multi-generational, advertiser-friendly programming,” now with global reach and “global flair.” Other sports with global ambitions (think WWE stablemate UFC to start) will join soon enough. Amazon also will grow its live-event footprint, beginning with its new NBA/WNBA deal.
- ESPN The App launches, Venu doesn’t, and cable collapses. The long-in-coming move this summer of the Worldwide Leader to a true streaming experience with all of its top-tier sports rights (ESPN+ has been a badly undernourished placeholder for too long) will quickly be successful, even at $25 per month. Venu – the sports-focused skinny bundle from Disney, Fox and WBD – never survives the legal injunction delaying its launch, its business model missing a brief window of opportunity. More generally, with the most important network on cable now available a la carte on streaming, and many pro and college franchises shifting from regional sports networks to streaming or broadcast, millions of customers will have few reasons to keep cable. Expect cord-cutting, already whacking subscription rates 12 percent in 2024’s first three quarters to less than 50 million U.S. households, to accelerate.
- Women’s sports take another big step. The WNBA had its biggest year ever in 2024, thanks to Caitlin Clark fever and a stirring Olympic gold-medal run by the league’s other stars. Game attendance was up nearly 50 percent, and telecasts drew a record 54 million. With new contracts and more attention, the WNBA (and college women’s basketball led by UConn’s Paige Bueckers and USC’s Juju Watkins) will continue to break through. But it won’t just be basketball. The NWSL has big-name investors such as Disney CEO Bob Iger and his comm-school dean of a wife, Willow Bay, and bigger ambitions ahead of the 2027 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Also important: Netflix just grabbed those US rights for both 2027 and 2031, so expect lots more women’s soccer programming on Netflix in the next two years. Other women’s sports will benefit from growing interest and visibility on social media and streaming for tech-savvy college and pro stars in sports such as gymnastics, snowboarding, soccer, softball, volleyball, and skateboarding.
