Hollywood’s box office is still struggling, and according to former Amazon Studios boss Roy Price, the problem isn’t COVID, streaming, or superhero fatigue. It’s woke culture and lazy writing.
In a lengthy post this week on Substack, Price, who helped launch Amazon’s TV and movie division, blamed the industry’s collapse in quality on bad creative decisions. He argues that Hollywood has abandoned sharp, character-driven storytelling in favor of safe, politically correct scripts that don’t challenge anyone or make people laugh.
The Death of Comedy
One of the biggest casualties? Comedy. Price points out that comedies used to account for 15%–20% of the box office. In 2025, they’re barely 2%.
Where’d they go? Woke Hollywood killed them.
Today, writers and directors are terrified of offending anyone. Classic comedies—Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Caddyshack, The Hangover—wouldn’t survive a pitch meeting. Instead, studios crank out bland content that tries to check social media boxes but forgets to be funny.
And no, these comedies aren’t secretly thriving on streaming. Price challenges anyone to name a single great, original streaming comedy from the last five years. They don’t exist.
Coincidentally (or not), the domestic box office is down about 17% from pre-pandemic levels. Price suggests that the missing comedy audience explains a big part of that gap.
Bad Development, Worse Characters
The problem runs deeper than comedy. Price also says Hollywood’s development process has fallen apart. Studios used to spend years developing great scripts. Now, they push half-finished stories into production, afraid of taking creative risks.
Price points to two recent creative failures:
- Materialists, a romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans, failed to deliver believable characters or even a single memorable joke.
- Pixar’s Elio, meant to be a heartfelt animated adventure, fell flat with a boring lead character and recycled story beats.
Both films suffer from the same woke-era problem: characters have no depth because writers are afraid to make them flawed or real. Instead, we get cardboard cutouts designed not to offend anyone.
As Price puts it: “Never make anything for bad reasons. There is only one good reason: this film is going to be amazing.”
Price also points out that the New York Times Top 100 films list includes 14 movies from each three-year period between 2000 and 2017, yet only 15 films total from the entire six-year stretch of 2018 to 2023, when you’d expect nearly twice that many, despite these newer films being fresher in people’s minds.
The collapse in quality movies and TV projects lines up with the rise of the “woke mind virus” in Hollywood, where writers and studios care more about pushing agendas than making great stories people actually want to watch.
Woke Culture Fears Smart Storytelling
Price doesn’t name names, but it’s clear what he’s talking about. Since 2017, Hollywood has been obsessed with politics and social media outrage. He says there was a “sense that anything too elite was bad and anything too hard to write was elite.”
That means no more Mad Men. No more The Sopranos. Even Tootsie—which took years of rewrites to perfect—wouldn’t get made today. Too risky. Too difficult.
Instead, studios aim for safe, simple, politically correct stories. And audiences are tuning out.
The Solution: Make Great Movies Again
Price says the way forward is simple but hard: Hollywood has to care about quality again.
He specifically calls for a return to real development—multiple drafts, tough notes, and hard work. And while he doesn’t directly mention DEI or social media, his argument makes it clear what’s holding Hollywood back today. If you connect the dots, the fixes are obvious:
- Stop chasing social media trends.
- Stop producing scripts that check DEI boxes but ignore character and story.
- Bring back real development: multiple drafts, tough notes, and hard work.
As Price reminds people, the industry has always thrived on a few great movies, not endless mediocre ones. Today’s studios aren’t even aiming for greatness. They’re settling for “good enough”—and it shows.
Until Hollywood remembers how to write great characters and tell meaningful, funny, or moving stories, expect the box office slump—and the audience exodus—to continue.
