| The lights were bright at the Bloomberg Screentime conference this week, but many of the speakers were worried about what’s lurking in the shadows for the entertainment industry. Felix Gillette was there to capture the mood. Plus: A new episode of the Everybody’s Business podcast, and why spicy noodles are an online hit. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Greg Peters, the co-chief executive officer of Netflix Inc., sat on stage Wednesday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles and pondered the state of things. “This is the most competitive entertainment environment that has ever existed on the planet in the history of humankind, and it’s getting more and more competitive,” he said. “If you don’t maintain a sense that you are constantly vulnerable, I think you will lose.” This was a recurring sentiment over the course of our two-day annual event, which features executives in media, technology and sports dissecting the major issues affecting their businesses. Keep evolving or go extinct. The threats are everywhere. Welcome to Hollywood in 2025, where the industry’s traditional, swaggering invincibility has given way to a growing sense of vulnerability—technologically, economically and politically. There are plenty of reasons to feel anxious. Hollywood’s grip on movie audiences around the world is slipping, with its share of the global box office declining from 92% to 66% over the past two decades amid stepped-up competition from places like China and South Korea. Meanwhile, after a pair of painful labor strikes, the boom years of so-called Peak TV—in which entertainment companies, egged on by Wall Street, cranked out massive amounts of lavish programming to pump up their new streaming services—have come to a screeching halt. With investors now demanding profits, the country’s biggest media conglomerates have plunged into an indefinite period of cost-cutting and belt-tightening. What work remains has been shifting away from Los Angeles, as penny-pinched productions chase tax breaks and cheaper, non-unionized labor elsewhere. The resulting talent drain is another cause for alarm. “Our leadership—citywide, statewide—have an arrogance to them,” Rick Caruso, the Southern California real estate mogul, said at the conference on Thursday. “They seem to think that because the entertainment industry was born here and built here that they don’t need to attend to it and it will just stay here. But that’s not the reality.”  Jimmy Kimmel, after his conversation with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg There’s also no shortage of political hazards challenging Hollywood. On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel spoke about how close he came to losing his late-night talk show on ABC after a backlash from the Trump administration and its conservative allies over remarks the comedian made about the shooting death of activist Charlie Kirk. His comments, Kimmel said, were “intentionally and maliciously mischaracterized” by the political right. Yet in the current capitulatory media environment their quest to get him off the air for good almost worked. “A list of demands was presented to me, and I was not going to go along with any of them,” Kimmel said. “And it’s like, well, I guess we’re done. I said to my wife, ‘That’s it. It’s over.’” The network’s suspension proved to be short-lived, and Kimmel’s show, having survived for now, will continue to grapple with the perils of rapid technological change—from the advent of video-generating AI tools like Sora to ceaseless competition for viewers’ attention from social media giants. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said Thursday that the platform is exploring a dedicated TV app as part of a deeper push into video. And no, he added, he’s not interested in buying traditional programming from Hollywood. To stock it, Instagram would presumably rely on its 3 billion monthly users. In spite of it all, there remain a few scattered Hollywood optimists in the mix. Where many see signs of famine, David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount Skydance Corp, sees a feast.  Ellison. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg In August, after completing an $8 billion merger with his film production company Skydance Media, Ellison took over Paramount, the parent of CBS, Nickelodeon, MTV and the namesake movie studio. Since then—and backed by the fortune of his father, Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle Corp. and supporter of Donald Trump—he’s been making one splashy deal after another. The buying spree, Ellison suggested, is likely to continue. “There’s a lot of options out there in terms of what actually might be actionable in the near future,” Ellison told us Thursday. “We would approach that through the lens of wanting to make more, not less.” In the Hollywood of 2025, that’s about as swaggering as it gets. 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