It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally what raises living standards for everyone.
The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.
China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 10 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.
Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.
In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to allow building new homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1,000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).
We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.
Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.
Overseas has so much film infrastructure now that Hollywood flies out the entire cast and essential crew (DP, etc.) to work on American productions overseas. They hire cheaper local crews (who are non-union), rent cheaper facilities, and even collect foreign tax subsidies.
It's far cheaper to produce everything in the UK, Eastern Europe, or Asia than it is to film in LA. Or even heavily tax-subsidized states like Georgia.
America can't compete on film production cost anymore. So it's halfway through the process of leaving, except for shots that need to film in iconic cities like New York for certain key scenes. But even then, you might see only part of the production happen in the US.
This started during the pandemic content streaming wars. There was a huge demand for content, American studios were shut down, and Amazon and Netflix dabbled with trying to shoot overseas. They found out the foreign infrastructure was just fine and that they just needed to teach the local crews a few things to be able to lift and shift the entire production pipeline. And it was so much cheaper that the choice to move everything was obvious.
Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation/distribution easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned, QE/ZIRP/0% rates re-inflated a housing bubble, unions kept raising rates to keep up with housing in LA, internet/social content began competing with studio productions hurting demand, the incestuous hollywood-to-traditional media marketing pipeline died (much of old print/tv media existed to market Hollywood stars and products), etc. etc.
Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream hours of film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.
Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
Disagree. Good content is good content. International audiences show up for good American films, and Americans (increasingly) show up for good international films.
What are into the blonde movie stars is TikTok.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.