The Entourage Years: Hollywood's Last Glossy Run

The HBO show's eight seasons rode the DVD boom, and it ended the same month home video revenue was reported down 40%.

People are talking about an Entourage reboot again, and it's easy to see why. The HBO comedy about a movie star and his buddies from Queens caught this town at its most flush. Miss the money. Let the men who yelled about it stay retired.

The show aired during the last stretch when Hollywood's deal machine had fuel to burn. Discs kept paying long after opening weekend, buyers fought each other for projects and a backend was worth fighting over. That economy paid grips and editors as well as stars, and it's why those years still look glossy from here. The screaming agent and the boys' club weren't what made it run. They were the tax everybody paid to work inside it, and a reboot that brings back the swagger without the money gets the whole thing backwards.

Look at the calendar. Entourage premiered July 18, 2004, and wrapped Sept. 11, 2011, and DVD sales peaked in the mid-2000s. The show even had fun with the disc. In season five, Vince's passion project Medellin goes straight to DVD, and Ari tells him he's in "movie jail." The real joke was that the disc was where the money lived.

Then the floor gave out. By late September 2011, the month the finale aired, home entertainment revenue had dropped 40% and studios were turning to on-demand and downloads, according to Filmsite's history of the decade. That year, DreamWorks Animation ended its long pay-TV deal with HBO, Entourage's own network, and took its films to Netflix.

The slide didn't stop. Revenue from DVDs and Blu-rays fell $3 billion between 2009 and 2013. In 2016, U.S. digital video revenue of $11.4 billion beat physical media's $8.0 billion for the first time.

The buyers shrank, too. Netflix and Amazon stopped being just customers and started making their own movies, and Disney bought 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock, a deal Filmsite noted was expected to cut the number of studio releases. That's the electricity people miss when they get misty about Ari Gold closing deals. It came from a crowd of buyers and a product audiences paid for twice, once at the theater and again for the shelf.

The 2015 movie is the era's last receipt. In the plot, Ari gives up his severance for a cut of the backend grosses, and the film inside the film becomes a hit. The real one shot in Los Angeles and spent $39 million in California with the state's film tax credit. That's the part of Entourage I'd bring back first: a movie about rich guys that spent its budget here. It grossed $49.3 million worldwide, a disappointment once the $40.7 million ad spend went on top, and it hit DVD on Sept. 29, 2015, a year before streaming passed the disc.

What stays in 2011 is how the show treated the people below the title. When Lloyd, Ari's assistant, asks to become an agent, Ari puts him through a series of demeaning tests, and Lloyd quits over the abuse before Ari comes around. The show played it as comedy, and Jeremy Piven won three straight Emmys for the role. When the movie came out, the critic Mark Kermode wrote in The Guardian that "The Human Centipede was more sensitively attuned to issues of gender politics."

The show handled new voices about as well as it handled women. In season five, two unknown screenwriters write a script that gets renamed Smoke Jumpers and turns into a bidding war with Vince attached. The show's idea of a big break was the newcomers' pages with somebody else's name on top.

Someone will say the screaming and the money came as a set, that scarce jobs created the gatekeepers. They didn't. The money came from people buying movies to keep, not from assistants getting yelled at, and nothing about a backend check requires a Lloyd.

Even Vince Chase gets it. Adrian Grenier, who played him, told Us Weekly in March that he'd love to do the show again but is torn, because "it can't be the same thing, because it was so tied to that time," ¡Hola! reported. He also said a new version would have to deal with a lot of things that are current.

Then he named the real obstacle. "I think we need the script and we need the money," Grenier said. Hollywood can write a kinder Ari Gold any day it wants, and more than a decade after the movie, the town is still asking for another round.

Source: Wikipedia: Entourage (American TV series), retrieved November 13, 2026. Other sources: filmsite.org, Wikipedia: Ari Gold (Entourage), Wikipedia: Entourage (film), hola.com.