Not just comparable; easily greater than. US movie business has easily been more influential than Romanticism. That said... TFA makes undeniably valid points:
"Morale has been battered by tens of thousands of layoffs, the exodus of production from California to lower-cost territories, the waning cultural relevance of cinema versus social media, declining attendance at theater chains and fears that artificial intelligence will displace traditional moviemaking.
[...] this year’s Oscar race has been overshadowed by rival Paramount Skydance Corp.’s $110 billion deal to buy the company. It’s the third time Warner Bros. has been sold in less than a decade.
[...] Hollywood’s anxiety — the local industry’s challenges are often compared to the decline of automaking in Detroit — isn’t misplaced. The crisis has grown to such magnitude that last year, California doubled the annual assistance it gives to film and TV productions to $750 million to stop them from fleeing the state."
It should only scare you if you are ignorant.
>very few mediums have thusly pierced through across cultures and societies quite like Hollywood
This is laughable if you look at video games and music EVEN if you ignore everything american. Not mention Asia from Bollywood to Kpop to anime to HK cinema.
Take apocalypse now: a great piece of art. Was it worth the pain and suffering of its production? Absolutely not.
Hollywood should implode and hopefully the art form will resurrect for the better. But for me the primary reason is that they don't live up to what they are supposed to do. Creating good art.
Do I want movies to survive? Sure. But Hollywood as a thing was about vacuuming up every penny it could and that I do not grieve.
I agree that the good stuff is just a result of shotgunning, for every great movie, there are 100 that are forgettable. But we have the habit of concentrating power in one place, so I have no clue how it could be otherwise. Sure youtube is an alternative with myriad of independent creators, but it produced totally different outcomes.