Hollywood & Gaming
The New Hollywood Is a Controller
Gaming quietly became the biggest entertainment industry on the planet — and almost nobody outside it noticed. Here's what that actually means for all of us.
Let's start with something most people get wrong. When someone says "pop culture," they picture movies, maybe TV, music. They think of the Oscars, the Emmys, maybe the Grammys. What they almost never picture is a game controller — even though, by almost every meaningful measure, the gaming industry has already lapped traditional Hollywood. It's bigger. It costs more. It reaches more people. And it's quietly merging with the same entertainment machine that gave us the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pixar, and prestige TV. The convergence is happening right now, and most people haven't noticed because it didn't come with a press release.
Before we get into gaming specifically, though, it helps to understand how concentrated pop culture already was before gaming even entered the room.
Runs Everything
Here's a question worth sitting with: where does pop culture actually come from? The honest answer is that it comes from a strip of Southern California coastline, with New York playing a distant but meaningful second. Los Angeles — specifically the cluster of studios, agencies, and tech companies stretching from Burbank to Culver City to Santa Monica — is where the majority of the world's film, television, music, and now digital entertainment gets made, financed, and distributed. Hollywood isn't just a neighborhood. It's the factory.
New York punches above its weight in finance, publishing, fashion, and certain corners of media — late night television, the advertising industry, the news business. But for the raw output of pop culture as most people experience it? The West Coast dominates in a way that's almost hard to fully grasp.
"The culture most of the world consumes was made within about a thirty-mile radius of the same Pacific coastline. That's not an exaggeration — it's barely even a simplification."
And that geographic concentration maps almost perfectly onto corporate concentration. A handful of massive conglomerates own virtually everything you watch, hear, and increasingly play.
The Conglomerates That Run Pop Culture
Five parent companies. Between them they own the studios, the broadcast networks, the streaming platforms, the music labels, the theme parks, and — critically — the IP that the entire cultural conversation revolves around. You might choose between Netflix and HBO and Disney+, but you're still basically choosing between rooms in the same building.
Already Bigger
Now here's the thing that tends to genuinely surprise people when they hear it for the first time: the global gaming industry is already larger than the film and music industries combined. Not just as big. Larger. Combined.
That number — three billion gamers — is almost incomprehensible. That's roughly forty percent of every living human being on earth playing games in some form. Mobile alone accounts for nearly half the revenue. And unlike movies, which peak at release and then taper, a successful game can generate revenue continuously for years through updates, expansions, and in-game purchases.
And then there are the production budgets. This is where things get genuinely cinematic — in the literal sense. A major AAA game release today doesn't just cost as much as a Hollywood blockbuster. It often costs more.
Think about that last comparison for a moment. A Marvel movie — one of the most expensive and technically sophisticated products Hollywood makes — is roughly in the same budget range as a top-tier video game. Except the game took five to ten years to make, employs hundreds of writers, composers, performance capture actors, and narrative directors, and will likely generate revenue for a decade. The cinematic vocabulary of something like The Last of Us Part II or Red Dead Redemption 2 is not just comparable to film — in terms of scope and runtime, it exceeds it.
"A blockbuster game isn't a film with interactivity bolted on. It's a different art form — one that can take eighty hours to experience and cost more to make than most movies ever will."
Becoming One
The traffic between gaming and Hollywood now moves in both directions at once, and the speed is accelerating.
From gaming toward film and TV: The creative infrastructure of major game studios has quietly become indistinguishable from a film production. Naughty Dog, the studio behind The Last of Us, operates with casting directors, a full composers orchestra, and narrative teams that rival the best TV writers' rooms. The result speaks for itself — the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us is widely considered one of the best video game adaptations ever made, partly because the source material was already written and performed to a near-cinematic standard. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey weren't adapting a story so much as inhabiting performances that already existed in detailed form. The game had done the heavy lifting.
From Hollywood toward gaming: Meanwhile the conglomerates are moving fast in the other direction. Disney doesn't just make Star Wars movies — the gaming IP is enormously valuable and actively developed, from the EA deal era through to the upcoming Skydance and other studio projects. Sony's PlayStation Studios are now producing games the same way Sony Pictures produces films: with franchise thinking, long-term IP planning, and cinematic production values baked in from day one. Netflix quietly acquired several gaming studios and now bundles games with its streaming subscription. Apple Arcade exists as a platform. Amazon has an entire gaming division. These are not entertainment companies dabbling in gaming. They are entertainment companies recognizing that gaming is where the next generation of audience relationships get built — and that interactive IP has a shelf life and engagement depth that passive content simply cannot match.
What's new and genuinely significant is the simultaneous worldbuilding model. Franchises like Destiny, Halo, or The Witcher no longer have a single "original" medium that others adapt from. The lore, the characters, the world — these develop across games, shows, comics, and merchandise in parallel. There's no hierarchy of canon anymore. The IP just lives across everything at once.
Consolidation Problem
Here's the part of the story that gets the least attention, possibly because it's the most recent: gaming itself is undergoing the same consolidation that happened to Hollywood decades ago. The indie scene is alive and producing extraordinary work, but at the top of the industry, power is concentrating fast.
The New Gaming Conglomerates
Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard was the most expensive acquisition in gaming history — roughly $69 billion — and it was explicitly about control of IP, franchises, and the infrastructure of gaming itself. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Overwatch, Diablo — all now under one roof with Xbox and Game Pass. The deal took years to clear regulators across multiple countries because it was plainly understood as a consolidation of market power, not just a business transaction.
Then there's Tencent, the Chinese tech giant that most Western audiences have barely heard of — despite the fact that it has ownership stakes in dozens of the world's most significant game studios and publishers. Tencent owns Riot Games outright (League of Legends, Valorant), holds a large stake in Epic Games (Fortnite, the Unreal Engine that powers half the games and an increasing number of film VFX projects), and has fingers in Ubisoft, Activision, and many others. It is, quietly, one of the most powerful forces in global gaming — and by extension global pop culture — that almost nobody outside the industry thinks about.
"Tencent has significant ownership in companies that make the games, the engine that builds the games, and the storefronts that sell them. It's the kind of vertical integration that would make the old Hollywood studios blush."
The pattern is familiar because it's the same pattern Hollywood went through — consolidation of studios, consolidation of distribution, IP portfolios becoming the real currency. The difference is that gaming's consolidation is happening faster, at a global scale from the start, and intertwined with the tech industry in ways that make it far harder to untangle or regulate.
Actually Means
So step back and look at the full picture. You have traditional Hollywood — geographically concentrated in Southern California, corporately concentrated in five or six conglomerates — now actively merging with a gaming industry that is already larger, reaches more people globally, and is itself rapidly consolidating into a similarly small set of mega-players.
The cultural output of the entire Western world — the movies, the TV shows, the games, the music, the IP that defines shared cultural references for billions of people — is increasingly flowing from a small number of ZIP codes and an even smaller number of boardrooms.
It's what happens when entertainment becomes an industry with global scale and network effects — the biggest players get disproportionately bigger. When you're watching a Marvel show on Disney+, playing a PlayStation exclusive, or logging into a Blizzard game, you're participating in a single integrated entertainment ecosystem that has more in common with a utility than with the scrappy independent culture most people imagine when they think about creativity.
The creative people inside these systems — the developers, writers, directors, composers — are often doing extraordinary work. But the infrastructure they're doing it inside is becoming less diverse, less experimental, and more risk-averse at the top end, for exactly the same reasons that gave us forty Marvel movies and very few genuinely original studio blockbusters.
Gaming has, for a long time, prided itself on being different from Hollywood. More democratic, more diverse in its output, more willing to take risks. That pride is still earned in many corners of the industry. But at the top level, gaming is becoming Hollywood — in its economics, its IP strategies, its corporate structure, and its relationship to culture. The merger isn't coming. It's already well underway.
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