Ryan David Briggs is a PhD candidate in Media Studies. His research and teaching focus on media industry studies, Hollywood film and television history, and contemporary independent cinema. His dissertation project, “The Canary in the Hollywood Coal Mine: Mid-Range Movie Death and the Decline of the Film Business,” provides a recent periodization and historicization of Hollywood from 2005 to 2020. It highlights the significant negative impacts that industrial transformations had on non-blockbuster filmmaking in this period. This study explains how the film industry found itself in an unsustainably lopsided situation almost a full decade before the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked further havoc and argues that Hollywood’s transformation during the late 2000s and 2010s resulted in less originality, fewer films reflective of audience’s lived realities, and a less stable industry overall for filmmakers and film workers. Ryan's original research can be found in the South Central Review and The Velvet Light Trap.