How Gen Z will rewrite the rules of fame

What will Hollywood look like 10 years from now? It's a question that EW posed to dozens of filmmakers, musicians, producers, and actors for Hollywood 2032, our look at how popular culture might evolve over the next decade. Below, we discuss how pop culture will become more democratized and more diverse — and how the rules of fame will be rewritten by Gen Z.

For more than a century, Hollywood has manufactured not just high-profile art, but also high-profile stars — the kinds of globe-conquering performers who can attract millions of fans, get risky projects greenlit, and help keep countless jobs afloat. But over the next 10 years, the number of everybody-knows-their-name celebs will decrease, and the very definition of fame will be rewritten, as today's teens and twentysomethings steadily reshape the culture. By 2032, "the industry won't have the same ability to anoint who's next," Freeform president Tara Duncan tells EW. "It will be the other way round. The audience will decide, and they'll look for people they connect with, and who have a lived experience that they can relate to. And they'll follow those people through various life stages and cycles."

What might that mean for showbiz? Entertainers won't need to win over the entire world to succeed. Instead, there will be countless mini-movements in which entire careers will be sustained by a smaller number of mega-fans. That's already starting to happen now, thanks to companies like Patreon, which allows fans to directly fund musicians, podcasters, and YouTubers. And it will grow in the next decade, as actors and filmmakers turn to NFTs — or non-fungible tokens — to finance projects that once would have been backed by major studios. (That's how Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher raised millions for their forthcoming animated series Stoner Cats.)

With increasing ways for artists to support themselves, future pop culture will be more democratized. "Creators want to have a stake in what they create," says Axel Alonso, co-founder of AWA Studios, an entertainment company where creators own their IP. "That's when they do their best work." As DIY routes expand, says Emmett Shear, co-founder of the livestreaming entertainment service Twitch, "there will be many more people making a living from entertainment in 10 years." Comedy, predicts TV host Amber Ruffin, will become especially stratified: "We'll consume so many types of comedy that it'll be like genres of movies."

Many believe that democratization will enable a more diverse entertainers class of 2032 — despite Hollywood's lousy track record: A recent study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that while there is some progress, like the fact that the percentage of female-directed blockbusters has risen, there is still a lot more to improve, as groups like women and people of color remain drastically underrepresented. Over the next 10 years, as audiences demand stories and stars from around the globe, Hollywood will have to evolve if it wants to survive. "My hope is that, in 10 years," says Gou, "the face of whoever's leading pop culture — and where that person is from — will look very different."

In the post-superstar era, celebrities will be made without traditional showbiz machinery — the PR campaigns, marketing pushes, billboards, and (sigh) magazine covers — and they will transcend long-standing pop culture hierarchies. "One thing the social digital economy has reaped is a cultural flat earth," says Frank Simonetti, cofounder of Sweety High, a Gen Z-aimed integrated media platform. (Disclosure: Sweety High has a content agreement with EW.) "The idea of rock stars and movie stars as apex predators — the kids do not think that way these days, because it's all coming in as zeros and ones."

And the young audiences of 2022 — who will be creating and consuming much of what we watch and listen to in 2032 — are more culture-jammed than any generation before, with instant access to decades' worth of digitized history in their pockets. Nowhere is that sped-up hypermetabolism more apparent than in music. With so many musical styles available to sample on streaming — or via viral TikTok clips — the old-school, Breakfast Club-style cultural identities that music fans once assumed (I'm punk; I'm goth; I'm country) are nearing extinction. "We're playlist-generation kids," says 24-year-old Grammy winner Finneas. "It's rare you find a kid that's only listening to one genre of music. I wouldn't be surprised to see the delineation of genres [continue] to disappear in the coming decade."

You can already get early glimpses of our genre-agnostic future: It's in Charli XCX's style-smashing dance pop; 100 gecs' frenetic electro-nursery rhymes; the Armed's cosmic, synth-heavy hardcore punk. And over the next decade, as the internet becomes more available worldwide — and as homemade recording tech becomes even more accessible — expect our listening habits to become truly free of not only genre but also geography. "We'll have wider access to music and voices that we may not have had in the past, says singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos, "people who are making mind-blowing music that's coming from a different perspective."

To find out what else may await you in the pop culture landscape of 2032, time-travel over here.

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