The numbers don’t lie, and they’re brutal. For the third year in a row, the Golden Globes continue their ratings freefall, with just 8.66 million viewers tuning in for this year’s show.
That’s a seven percent drop from last year’s already embarrassing 9.27 million. And just in case anyone forgot: last year was down from the year before. And that year? Down from the year before that. It’s been nothing but red arrows for Hollywood’s big night, and there’s no sign of the bleeding stopping.
To give this some perspective, back in the early 2000s, the Golden Globes were pulling in around 20 million viewers on a regular basis. That wasn’t some golden age before the internet. We had the internet. We had cable. We had options. But people still showed up because they liked the shows, liked the stars, liked the movies, and—crazy idea—felt some kind of connection to what Hollywood was putting out.
But the tide started turning after 2020. The numbers tell the story: 18.32 million in 2020, then a cliff dive—6.91 million in 2021. No show in 2022. Then 6.3 million in 2023. A slight recovery to 9.47 million in 2024, then 9.2 in 2025, and now down again. This is what a slow-motion train wreck looks like, and the industry just keeps shoveling coal into the furnace like everything’s fine.
So what happened after 2020? Simple. Hollywood got loud, proud, and completely disconnected from Normal People. It stopped being about storytelling and entertainment and started being about messaging—relentless, in-your-face, self-congratulatory messaging.
Masculinity became a punchline. Traditional roles got swapped for smug lectures. Characters became symbols, not people. And the audience—oh yeah, the audience—they noticed.
We didn’t all suddenly lose interest in watching movies. We just stopped wanting to be insulted by them.
Now throw in AI, and things are about to get real weird—real fast. Because here’s what’s coming: just like independent media broke the corporate news monopoly, independent creators using AI will start chipping away at Hollywood’s iron grip on entertainment.
When Normal People can create content that speaks to Normal People, without gatekeepers, without lectures, and without the smug glow of Hollywood moral superiority, guess what? The audience will come back—but they won’t be coming back to the old system.
They’ll be building something new. Watching something better. And Hollywood? It’ll be stuck wondering why nobody’s clapping anymore.
