The Death of Hollywood
Episode 2 of Israel Keyes Life in Full Detail is just about ready for release. The editing is done and the graphic elements are added, which just leaves adding music and captions, which we’re working on now, and our final review watch through to catch any mistakes.
As you know from the screenshots and behind the scenes info we’ve shared, this documentary has been a massive undertaking and a difficult project to execute with just two people.
With a run time of nearly 120 minutes, Israel Keyes Life in Full Detail: THE VICTIMS took over 2,000 individual edits, cutting together countless video clips, audio clips, and photographic elements. The average 2 hour film has about half that, 1,100 cuts.
There is a wealth of new evidence in this episode. We uncover a new potential victim with an original interview that we conducted, and show images and video that have never been released which we received from record requests we made to Texas as well as Essex, Vermont.
This episode also features audio interviews of Keyes that we have heard discussed by others but which, as far as we are aware, have never been released for direct consumption. We’re proud of the job that we’ve done, and we want as many people to see our work as possible.
If you’re on Facebook or Instagram… or Threads, which apparently has hundreds of millions of users now… maybe you’ve seen one of our recent ads. Ads are expensive, even on Facebook, where they’re relatively affordable. Google quoted us $3,000 for just 30 days, and our limited test run on Facebook was $200.
Advertising is great and all, but ads are nothing compared to you. Please share our work! Share it with friends and family, share it in the true crime communities and forums that you belong to, and connect us with the people who want the information we have to share.
This benefits you, too - the more we grow, the better our content can be, and the faster we can release it. We had hoped to find a partner for our documentary projects, but we have had a hell of a time despite our success on YouTube.
If the rumor mill is any indication, we’re in some pretty esteemed company. Even James Cameron can’t get movies made anymore, at least according to Michael Bay, who also can’t get movies made, and recently told the Hollywood Reporter, "No one can greenlight anything anymore."
Actress Christina Ricci echoed his comments, telling Indie Wire that, “I hope that we are able to get back to things being run by people who love film and TV — instead of by people who run corporations really well, I would say that’s the only thing I notice as an artist that is very challenging.”
Total hours of film produced in Hollywood dropped from 15,492 hours in 2018 to just 10,405 in 2024, most of it for television. Some of this is due to production moving to new, lower cost production centers like Las Vegas, Atlanta, Mexico, Europe(?)…
According to Business Insider, Hollywood's share of US film and TV jobs recently dropped to 22% from roughly 33% - but the reduction seems more tied to the decline of the industry as a whole.
The kind of movies I like the most certainly don’t seem to get made anymore, or if they do, the quality has suffered tremendously. And I don’t just mean the scripts, but those have suffered too. I mean how they look.
Compare the budgets for yourself: Jericho cost $2,000,000 an episode for 29 episodes for a total budget of $58,000,000. Civil War had a budget of $50,000,000. And Jericho was aired on CBS at a time when “aired” often still meant waves traveling through the literal air to a pair of rabbit ears.
If you account for inflation, $2,000,000 in 2006 would be over $3,000,000 in 2024, which means Jericho cost $87,000,000 in Civil War era dollars. That means Civil War cost just over $30,000,000 in 2006, Jericho era dollars. And it was A24's second-highest-grossing film, pulling in over $100,000,000.
It also somehow received generally positive reviews from critics, despite the fact that Civil War was one of the most disappointing films I’ve ever sat through. It doesn’t stand alone, and consumers besides me have noticed, whatever critics think.
Over the last 10 years, the number of theatrical movie tickets sold in America have dropped 38 percent while average ticket prices increased by 33 percent, per The Numbers. The 10 year average for total number of theatrical releases from major movie studios has dropped 30% since the 2000s. Where is everyone going? The streaming services? Well, kind of.
Even the streaming services are making less content and struggling for subscribers, aside from:
Netflix, who is holding out so far and still growing,
Amazon, who bought MGM for their content library, and uses Amazon Prime Video as a value add for Amazon Prime Members, meaning it doesn’t matter if it makes Amazon money or not, and
YouTube, which doesn’t pay for content but has billions of active users by offering easy, pain free distribution to creators like us.
Of the three, Netflix also seems to be having serious execution issues. American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden mysteriously failed to appear on its scheduled release date of March 10, 2025 with no update of any kind from the streaming service. An entertainment journalist claimed to have reached out to Netflix, whose only statement was reportedly:
“We are rescheduling the release for an unspecified later date.”
Director Carl Erik Rinsch was also recently arrested, indicted on charges of fraud and money laundering for allegedly stealing $11 million from Netflix.
Rinsch demanded the funds in order to finish a science fiction series that he never completed, according to the indictment. Netflix had agreed to provide over $60 million in several installments to produce the series.
After Rinsch ran over budget and told Netflix he could only deliver one episode, he demanded the $11 million to complete the first season. Not understanding the concept of the sunk cost fallacy, Netflix agreed to pay.
Instead of doing what he said he’d do, he allegedly transferred that money into his personal brokerage account, where he promptly lost around $6 million in just weeks.
After seemingly losing his mind, with erratic behavior reported both on set and at home - he apparently sent emails to Netflix execs about how he had a way to map "the coronavirus signal emanating from within the earth," and according to lawyers representing his wife, told her that airplanes were "organic, intelligent forces."
He was then served with divorce papers. Amid these troubles, he allegedly took the remaining funds from Netflix and invested millions of dollars into dogecoin, which he cashed out in May 2021 to pocket a cool $23 million.
He used it to: pick up five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari for $2.4 million, as you would, plus over $600,000 on luxury mattresses, with an additional $295,000 on luxury bedding and linens. He also shelled out over $150,000 on kitchen appliances and over $5 million on furniture, but still spent money on luxury stays at the Four Seasons, and of course, on lawyers to battle with Netflix.
Rinsch, 47, was picked up by police in West Hollywood, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. $11 million dollars is a lot of money, but Netflix likely barely registered the loss.
They ended 2024 with 302 million paid subscribers globally, up nearly 16%, generating $39 billion in revenue, a 15.7% increase from 2023. Unfortunately, increased competition paints a bleak picture even for Netflix.
Besides streaming, video games have taken a big cut of the industry, too - Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA) alone has made close to $9 billion USD. The two biggest films of all time - Titanic and Avatar - grossed about $3 billion each. Adjusted for inflation, the biggest movie of all time was Gone with the Wind, which has earned just over $4 billion - over almost 90 years.
The Lion King came out in 1994, just a few years before Titanic. As a kids movie, it includes the bonus of valuable merchandising rights, earning it about $7 billion total. That means GTA even knocked the Lion King off its throne, and GTA 5 was released in 2013.
The annual revenue of the global film industry was estimated at just over $100 billion in 2023, while the global video game market generated approximately $188 billion in revenue, and is projected to grow to over $400 billion by 2033. The film industry is projected to grow to about $150 billion in the same time frame.
Talent agencies are reportedly also struggling, perhaps because the industry essentially boxed people out. We’ve spent years trying to find an agent to put a deal together based on the YouTube success of our first amateur effort, Israel Keyes Life in Detail.
That’s now closing in on 100,000 views, which we think is amazing, even if it’s also a laughably trivial number in the wider YouTube ecosystem where the Baby Shark Dance is approaching 16 BILLION views.
Reports differ on exactly how many YouTube channels there are, but estimates put the number between 50-100 million YouTube channels in total, with only about about 38 million of these considered active.
Of those, about 10 million have 1,000 subscribers or more; that’s just 9% of all YouTube channels. Two million YouTube channels have at least 10,000 subs; that’s less than 2% of all YouTube channels or about 1 in 57.
There are just over 500,000 YouTube channels with at least 100,000 subscribers, which is 0.28% of all YouTube channels. Around 29,000 channels have over a million subscribers, roughly 2,000 channels have over 10,000,000, and only 10 have over 100,000,000 which makes these the 1% of the 1%.
The largest of all is MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, who has 375 million subscribers as of March 18, 2025, and is currently adding new subscribers at a rate of about 400,000 per day.
Donaldson was formerly represented by Night Media, with CEO Reed Duchscher personally representing the YouTuber. In May 2024, Donaldson announced he would no longer be represented by Night Media, stating he wanted more control over his business and to focus on building his own internal team.
In March of 2024, Donaldson signed a deal that Night Media arranged with Amazon Prime Video to create a game show, Beast Games. When the negotiations were underway, a source valued the deal near $100 million dollars. Beast Games is kind of like Squid Game: the Challenge involves 1,000 players competing for “the largest prize in entertainment history,” $5,000,000.
Our own more modest subscriber count is now over 12,000, which puts us in the top 2% of YouTube creators. We also have a paid subscribers here at Crime Culture Media, yet we can’t seem to find representation to put together a deal with someone like Netflix, Amazon, or HBO.
We know that there are people getting signed who aren’t the largest YouTuber ever; we’ve seen people with less subscribers than we have and no revenue manage to get deals together. We don’t resent their success, we just wish we knew their secret!
Just looking for a rep is a lot of work on top of trying to build channels across all social media channels, plus our own platform, while also putting electricity on the table. In the end, we decided to do what we were already doing.
We made the update ourselves - Israel Keyes Life in Full Detail - and put it out ourselves, on our own platform, Crime Culture Media.
Netflix costs nearly twice what we cost - $17.99 a month - and while they offer a lot more variety than we do (for now), they don’t offer a direct relationship with creators. 300 million users is a lot - we’d love to have that many subscribers - but it’s a drop in a bucket in a world of over 8 billion people.
The old star system is collapsing in on itself, creating a black hole where fame and talent used to be. Although we’d still happily take their money to deliver content, our guess that on a long enough time horizon, creators like us will kill the dinosaurs of TV and film. Even the new dinosaurs, like Netflix.
YouTube will probably fare better since they’re free, don’t pay for content, and they have nearly 10x the number of active users as Netflix. Even some people in Hollywood, a town well known for being divorced from reality, can see the writing on the wall.
As a small bit creator of Offroad and snowmobile content on YouTube, seeing your editing screen was shocking. Thank you for all you do and really looking forward to Episode 2.