Seth Rogen is stressed-out in teaser for movie business series The Studio, ironically made for streaming

The movie business is always lurching from one existential crisis to another.

For a relatively young industry – a century and some change – it’s faced a lot of challenges to its profit model, mostly driven by game-changing technology.

First it went from silence to sound, then colour happened, and TV sets were invented which kept people at home and away from theatres. Today, it’s streaming, which has been upending the industry for the past decade.

Great auteurs and movie stars have been lured by the big bucks the streaming companies were throwing around, although this has slowed recently, while cinemas have all struggled to completely recover from covid-enforced shutdowns.

Audience behaviour has changed, and many are no longer in the habit of regular cinema-going, turning out only for massive “tentpole” or “event” experience, generally the fourth blockbuster in an existing franchise.

That all has the effect of making the mid-budget studio movie (think: comedies, rom-coms, adult dramas, original thrillers) an endangered species at the cinema.

So, yes, the movie business is in yet another existential crisis.

You can feel the panic in the first teaser trailer for Seth Rogen’s new project, The Studio. The video runs for only one minute but it is rife with panic, scored with a manic jazz composition that combined with the frantic editing, spikes your anxiety levels.

The story is centred on Matt (Rogen), the newly arrived chief executive of a movie studio, Continental. Things are already not going well as he tells someone (Catherine O’Hara), “I got into this because I love movies. But now I have this fear my job is to ruin them”.

He’s told by someone else (Bryan Cranston), “At Continental, we don’t make artsy fartsy films, we make movies, movies!”

Martin Scorsese berates him, “You’re talentless, spineless”, Zac Efron tells him, “No one likes you”, while Charlize Theron simply says, “Get the f**k out of here”. Ron Howard is briefly glimpsed throwing something at Matt’s head.

He’s stressed.

The show will also star Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Chase Sui Wonders playing characters, versus the likes of Scorsese who appear to be cameo-ing as heightened versions of themselves.

Rogen and his creative partner Evan Goldberg are co-creators alongside Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez.

Hollywood has always had this internal conflict between art and commerce, which it sometimes successfully balances by making great art that also makes a hell of a lot of money.

The Studio looks like it’ll be a bonkers behind-the-scenes tour through a crazy industry filled with egomaniacs and sensitive souls, and those two types are not mutually exclusive, as one man tries to hold on to what made him want to work in movies in the first place.

Ironically, this movies business story is a 10-part TV series that’s been made for streaming.

The Studio will be released on Apple TV+ on March 26.