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As 2025 draws to a close, it feels…catastrophic. The news of the last month in the entertainment industry has been demoralizing. The U.S. political space is a fascist nightmare. AI and corporate ownership are teaming up to transform the media to something complacent, useless, and untrustworthy. Things are…not good.

For me, I’ve been out of work for over a year now. Yes, I’ve been working nonstop with gigs at Oni Press, The Beat, Comic Book Club, and elsewhere — and I’m very grateful for those — but it’s been more than a year since I had a steady, full-time job that I could rely on the pay the rent.

During that time, of course, inflation has spun out of control. The cost of living is shockingly high, making these freelance gigs feel like a bucket I’m using to bail out the Titanic.

I work in entertainment journalism — that’s the cross section of two industries that are, frankly, in shambles. Hollywood has been a shell of itself since the 2020 theater shutdowns, TV is less relevant than it has been since it was invented, and streaming is almost impossible to make profitable. Physical media from books to music to movies is struggling to keep its corporate parents from smothering it with a pillow.

The U.S. president has been consolidating power, using the courts and abusing his authority to try to force his critics into submission, and normalizing rampant corruption on a scale never seen before in this country. The country has been transfixed by a constant, normalized stream of state-sponsored violence against immigrants, activists, and basically anyone else who ends up on the President’s list of perceived enemies. Meanwhile, the media continues to look the other way, either because they’re being bribed, bullied, or both.

With right-wing billionaires taking over Paramount (which led indirectly to my layoff), it somehow feels like a blessing that Skydance/Paramount lost their bid to control Warner Bros. Discovery, and the company will instead become a subsidiary of Netflix. The scenario itself — Netflix buying a major studio, weakening the theatrical industry and jeopardizing the future of physical media — is nightmarish, but the fact that it’s the lesser of the two possible evils is as obvious as it is demoralizing.

And, yes, that means that Warners — finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel following the success of big hits like Superman and Barbie — will be sold once again. The company has had very little stability since its turn-of-the-century sale to AOL, but at least Netflix has enough cash on hand that it seems like this time might be more stable than the last. The previous two acquisitions — by Verizon and then by Discovery — were both done with so much borrowed money that the purchases saddled Warners with totally insurmountable debt, making a follow-up sale virtually assured.

Paramount, recently acquired by Skydance, seemed like an okay fit for Warner Bros. at first — but with so much new debt just taken on, Skydance was far less stable than Netflix — so much so that even after a hostile takeover bid jacked up the price, Warner Bros. stuck with the streaming giant. At the same time, Paramount has been making increasingly aggressive moves to the right politically, announcing plans to go all-in on right-wing identity politics in their movies and handing CBS News over to a conservative activist. It’s unlikely that WBD’s David Zaslav — himself a big fan of the MAGA movement — cared much about this, but it certainly didn’t help public perception of the Paramount brand.

Neither did their decision to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Announced earlier this year, the decision was the first salvo in what appears to be the American right’s war on late-night comedy. With TV audiences diminishing every day, late night is in a bad place right now. Still, Colbert maintains the top spot in the ratings, and the decision to call it quits was viewed as a political capitulation to conservatives.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that late night comedy is already on the way out, and CBS was just trying to get out ahead of the trend. That argument is harder to take seriously when combined with not only the other changes at CBS, but ABC’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air, seemingly at the president’s insistence, after he made a fairly toothless joke following the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Along with these aggressive moves by right-wing activists and billionaire owners to kill dissent through comedy, the President also unilaterally took over the Kennedy Center for the Arts and is rapidly transforming it into a nakedly partisan operation aimed at celebrating artists whose values align with the state. It’s a wildly unAmerican move, and one that appears to be literally illegal, but nobody is doing anything because that’s just…how things are now, I guess.

That’s a through-line to all of these right-wing attacks on art, entertainment, and free speech: this kind of abhorrent behavior has become so normalized over the course of the last 10 years that nobody is even all that surprised or outraged anymore. As close as we got was a groundswell of public support for Kimmel, but that was largely because the political manipulation was so patently obvious no reasonable person would deny it was happening (although plenty tried). This is why, to me, there’s some shared DNA between all of these things and some of the other big, bad moments of 2025: the idea of “normal” is seemingly out the window — maybe for the foreseeable future.

Much of it is political, often driven by a depraved and senile President, but not all. Some of it is just the end result of decades of unchecked greed or even just bad habits. The problem is — once you reach the “end result,” what do you do next?

This isn’t just a bad patch. The media is having an existential crisis at what appears to be the beginning, not the end, of a looming economic depression. This is something else — something bad. Years, maybe decades, of terrible practices have compounded upon themselves, leading to this moment, and it’s difficult to see a positive outcome in the next few years. It feels like the end of Avengers: Endgame, when suddenly you realize you have a universe that has to keep going even though the story is over.

And, uhh…we can see how well that’s been going.

Sorry for being a downer. Happy New Year.