And yet on this day, all such matters—macro and micro—were back of mind as WME and its bankers set to crunching the numbers to arrive at a stock valuation. And then crunch them again. And again.

Emanuel and the team worked the figures with the Goldman advisers, searching for a scenario, any scenario, that would produce an inside straight. Nothing seemed to work, and slowly the room began to realize that going public would mean setting a price far below what they had come for, and probably getting even less than that. For the many agents and executives of William Morris Endeavor who had followed Emanuel through the wilderness, working at reduced pay in exchange for equity, it was the jackpot deferred. And for many observers both in and outside the company, it was the unthinkable: The unstoppable Ari Emanuel had met an immovable object.

Word quickly got out, and from one end of town to the other, the schadenfreude flowed. After decades of watching Emanuel grow, grow, grow—dangerously! recklessly! so many had warned—finally, the comeuppance. WME president Ari Greenburg was en route to the New York Stock Exchange for the traditional bell ringing and had to be called back. Someone forgot to cancel the In-N-Out truck that had been ordered for the next day’s soirée at the company’s headquarters. The would-be centerpiece of the celebration became a glum consolation. No zillions this year, but here’s a cheeseburger. In the days to come, stories ricocheted across L.A. of real estate agents who suddenly found their weekends free as WME agents canceled their appointments to search for that perfect upgrade in the hills. By December, the New York Post was reporting that a number of agents at the company were feeling burned and eyeing the exits.

“The first rule of agenting is don’t count your chickens,” said one observer. “A lot of people had calculated the price tags on a lot of chickens.”

Such sentiment shouldn’t come as a surprise in a town that’s never been rich in sympathy for one’s rivals. But speaking to other agents and industry players in the months since WME’s failure to launch has yielded much more than just the usual told-ya-sos and grave dancing. As of this writing, the entire entertainment industry is marching toward a cliff commonly called the streaming wars. After years of ignoring the disruptive potential of on-demand video and actively licensing their product to their usurpers, the button-downed mandarins of today’s Hollywood have finally taken note. Everyone is spending at levels never seen before to try to capture a piece of the new market, which may, in the course of things, displace not just traditional cable money but the entire movie business.

Does any of this add up? What lies on the other side of the cliff? No one knows, but it will certainly bring ruin and disaster for at least some of them. Is each little Hollywood fiefdom meant to sit patiently and wait to be swallowed? Since the ’80s, but really even back to the days of radio, agencies have supplemented their 10 percent commissions with packaging fees—an arrangement through which an agency bundles clients into one project and forgoes its usual commission for a share of the eventual revenue. The upside became so lucrative in recent years that it essentially paid for A-list agenting: offices, suits, cars, travel. The arrival of the streaming giants caused the packaging well to dry up. The streamers by and large pay huge prices for shows and their rights, which means no back end or ownership. For the agencies, that meant falling back on a business of working just for commissions. Endeavor’s push to grow and diversify can be seen as a need to have a product that’s more durable and independent of the goodwill of clients (whose own career life spans are getting shorter).

Love it or hate it, WME’s moon shot had come to represent (and may yet still) a different kind of Hollywood future—one grounded in a romanticized version of its past as home to outsize egos and galactic ambitions. Emanuel’s fate presented a veritable whiteboard upon which so many in town could mark up their own existential anxieties. So have we reached the natural limits of how far a brash, swashbuckling showbiz mogul can go on energy and imagination? Or is a force of nature like Ari-dom not to be that easily derailed?