How bad is the American Economy? According to Alec Baldwin on twitter, pretty terrible, but what does his recent anecdote really mean?
"The American economy is now like musical chairs. Each decade, the music stops, we take away some more chairs."
With a record high deficit, an unemployment rate of close to 10% and non-stop doom like predictions in the press, it's pretty easy to say things are bad. Even Hollywood has predicted it's the end of the world in many of its movies past and present from Roland Emmerich's '2012' to Steven Soderbergh's 'Contagion'. Sure, these movies don't center around a financial crisis but there is a general tone of anxiety about the future in American media and in some major movie releases. On top of that, they are proving to be successful.
The film industry continues to move in new technological directions with a digital content boom in the making. The financing model for movies is slowly changing with crowdsourcing become evermore popular on sites like kickstarter. The big Hollywood studio movies are definitely here to stay, and even though the 'economy' of the film industry is changing, audiences still want to watch movies. There are also opportunities for people to explore entrepreneurship on the web such as blogs, making money from videos, establish their own brands, sell products to domestic and international audiences and so on. A lot of people are suffering due to the bad economy, but becoming more entrepreneurial, flexible, and embracing the web, will replace the sacrifices made in recent times to start something new.
Time to put those chairs back in because the music's playing a different tune.
