From Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler edition, “The Showbiz State of the Union”: “Deeper and scarier is the question posed by YouTube, whose viewership dwarfs Netflix, Amazon, and every studio and network in the history of humanity times a million. While box office is roughly steady, there is a generation rolling our way that doesn’t think of Netflix as TV — it thinks of YouTube as all entertainment.

“It’s a very open question whether a generation that has been taught for ten years now to inhale multiple screens at every waking second will have the patience to watch episodes of TV, much less movies.

“The effects of the smartphone on the brain are just beginning to be understood, but there’s every reason to be terrified that after total screen immersion since birth, sitting through a traditional TV show will seem like water torture to [Generation Z]. Which is why this would be a wonderful moment for Hollywood, led by a new generation, to be searching outward into the world, finding new ways to communicate, new formats, new stories that connect with the coming age, instead of…well, that brings us to our problems at home.”