2025 Vision: A Special Report on Hollywood in the Attention Economy

With the dawn of a new year in the media business, here’s a “resolution” to consider in more than one sense of the word: Make sure you’re viewing the competition with total clarity.

The entertainment industry has suffered from tunnel vision amid decades dedicated to making little more than movies and TV shows. And now the Variety Intelligence Platform special report “2025 Vision: Hollywood Blind Spots” offers a set of corrective lenses.

This report puts showbiz in the broader context of the attention economy, where there’s so much more vying for U.S. audience eyeballs than the titles staring out from multiplex marquees and living-room EPGs.

Sure, there’s still at least one too many streaming services in the marketplace. But widen the aperture, and there’s much more hiding out in Hollywood’s peripheral vision: Roblox, Twitch, TikTok (for now, anyway) and on and on.

As this report demonstrates with extensive data and insights — notably, exclusive findings from Luminate’s expansive “Entertainment 365” survey spanning 2022-24 — next year may overheat the attention economy like never before.

The full breadth of what’s jostling for consumer mindshare truly comes clear when you consider the state of rival sectors, from the resurgent video gaming sphere, which has major launches ahead with “Grand Theft Auto 6” and a successor to its Nintendo Switch handheld device, to social media, where short- and long-form video formats are challenging the premium-entertainment ecosystem.

Welcome to the year when podcasts are no longer just audio and it’s time to rethink how to make the competition work to your advantage as “co-opt-ition.”

Media myopia doesn’t have to be a terminal condition. “2025 Vision” is just the forecast you need to ensure you don’t lose sight of the many forces impacting the business.