Will 2023 Change Hollywood?

The year colour returned to cinema

Leo Cookman
8 min readDec 4, 2023

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I’m sure there will be a thousand of this type of retrospective article published everywhere this month, but if you’re interested in cinema 2023 does feel important. Because, like it or not, this year was a watershed. After over a decade of stagnation (not just in cinema but we’ll stick with that for this article) the film industry has undergone some pretty seismic shifts in the last 12 months.

Whether it’s the combined strikes by SAG-AFTRA / WGA, or the multiple major flops based on ‘sure-thing’ franchises produced by major studios, the industry has had some pretty big waves crashing against its proverbial hull this year. On a purely business level, Hollywood is under a microscope right now and should be drastically rethinking its strategies, because if it isn’t and they double down on their lack of originality and exploitation, this boat’s going to start taking on water (alright, I’ll drop that metaphor now). But this isn’t the only interesting part of cinema in 2023. The biggest changes have been in how this year’s biggest/most prominent movies feel.

Copyright Focus Features

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Leo Cookman

Peripatetic Writer. “Time’s Lie” out now from Zero Books.