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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> Viewers today expect incredible production value.

Not really, no. I expect interesting movies, and I'd say being an interesting movie doesn't have anything to do with CGI. I'm a film buff through and through and it almost literally pains me when I see that people involved in the movie industry don't seem to understand what their problem is: they don't make films for grown-ups anymore.

The only outlet that has provided interesting movie-like content in the last 10-15 years was television. There's almost no CGI in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Black Mirror (to just name a few), shows that have made me casually think about them while I was riding the tramway and the like years after I had last seen them.

I miss great movies.

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Agreed.

I don't think there's any CGI in Pulp Fiction (1994) and it cost around $9 million to make in 1994 dollars. It made around $200 million worldwide. Whiplash (2014) , a more recent movie with little to no CGI, cost $3.3 million to make and made around $49 million worldwide.

The point is that people want interesting, well written movies with great stories. If that warrants CGI sure, but it's not a requirement.

A boring movie is not good. But a boring and expensive movie is terrible and that's what's mainly being put out: boring and expensive movies.

As far as movies with huge production budgets for every great movie with a justified fair amount of CGI there's tens of crappy ones many that break even or don't make their money back.

Creatively speaking there's probably never been a worse time for big Hollyood movies.

Pulp Fiction was one of the first movie that came to my mind as well. It's a beautiful movie (visually), and could be made today for the same cost as it was in 1994.

Looking back at movies from several decades ago, the credit scroll had a few hundred people at most. Now there are a few hundred animators for something like Arrival. Interestingly, Arrival's credits list about the same number of people as Terminator 2. Both excellent movies, but one is small and intimate, and the other grand and explosive - same size crew, much higher balance on visual effects in Arrival vs. practical engineering and effects in T2. Would Arrival have been significantly different or less effective if made with 1991 technology? Probably not.

"[They] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

How "accurate" are credits lists though? Couldn't it be that the credits simply list every employee of every company that did any contract work for the film? It seems plausible that many of the people listed didn't even work a full day on the film.

Credits aren't accurate at all. When you "subcontract" out something, it usually includes a fixed number of credits no matter how many people worked on it.

While this is possible, longer credits mean more filmstock to be duplicated and fewer showings per theater screen, so there is an economic incentive to keep them as short as possible. I know when I worked in the VFX industry an artist had to clock a certain number of hours on a given show to be given credit for the work.

Surely the difference is nearly negligible. With the exception of movies with popular after-credits scenes, I assume people leave when the credits start anyway, and I suspect the employees can begin cleaning when people clear out even if credits are still running.

However, Pulp Fiction wasn't created at a time where home movies were so widespread. If a movie is character-driven, there's not a lot of benefit to seeing it in a cinema these days, as opposed to the comfort of your own home. Big effects on the other hand, they benefit from the cinema experience.

> The point is that people want interesting, well written movies with great stories.

If they did, then these films would be the blockbusters. Whereas Adam Sandler's films were routinely panned for being crap, yet routinely pulled in 8 figures.

I slightly disagree with everything you said.

    > Pulp Fiction wasn't created at a time where
    > home movies were so widespread

VHS: 1976

Pulp Fiction: 1994

I'm not sure what you mean, then, by "home movies." If you mean "home theater," well, even middle-class people were spending loads of dough on big-screen TVs and hi-fi surround sound.

By "home movie" do you mean the ultraconvenience of streaming Netflix, Amazon, and Youtube? Then you probably have a point, even though it wasn't that hard to drive down to Blockbuster.

  > If a movie is character-driven,
  > there's not a lot of benefit to seeing it in a cinema these days
  > as opposed to the comfort of your own home.
  > Big effects on the other hand, they benefit from the cinema experience.

I think seeing a movie in a theater is more social than technical.

  >> The point is that people want interesting,
  >> well written movies with great stories.

  > If they did, then these films would be the blockbusters.
  > Whereas Adam Sandler's films were routinely panned for being crap,
  > yet routinely pulled in 8 figures.

I think you two are talking past each other. He's talking about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, which check all the boxes in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But you think he means The Remains of the Day or some other literary adaptation that nobody really likes. So as a contrast you pull out low-brow comedies, the cinematic equivalent of going out and getting drunk. But those same audiences also went to see Lord of the Rings.

> VHS: 1976

"were so" != "nonexistent". Compare the home movie experience of 1994 to that of 201x. 'On-demand' wasn't even a pipe dream in 1994.

> I think seeing a movie in a theater is more social than technical

Maybe for teens who gather in cliques, but otherwise we're just going to disagree there.

> He's talking about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings,

The Star Wars middle trilogy was schlock. They were terrible stories. They sold on hype, colour and motion, and brand recognition. The first one even had a damn half-hour advert for a podracing videogame in the middle of it. And Lord of the Rings was an adaptation of the most successful fantasy novel ever (the genre-defining one at that); not exactly a typical datum. How many times can you do that?

Don't get me wrong, I'm of the opinion that hollywood should spend a million less on special effects and a million more on screenplay, but the whole "people prefer good stories" just doesn't pan out when it comes time to open their wallets. For example, Lord of the Rings had been done a couple of times before in movie and TV form, and it wasn't that popular in that form... until it had mindbogglingly massive special effects and money thrown at it.

Anyway, if you think that the Star Wars prequels were good stories and that pulled the punters, I strongly recommend you watch Plinkett's reviews of them[1] - the voice is annoying, the reviews are mostly funny, but really he eviscerates the exceptionally poor storytelling in them. In there there's even an excerpt from an editor's session where Lucas and Co. are talking about a problem with the ending, where they have the viewer rotating through four very different emotions from four different plotlines in only 90 seconds, none of which can be excised as they're all concluding at the same time... and the mood is very much "we've fucked this up".

[1]http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/

It's not spending, it's culture - or lack of it. Adult audiences are tired of getting beaten around the head by constant explosions, emotionally empty CGI, childish plots and scripts with breathtakingly bad writing, and tuneless Zimmer-esque BWAAAAAARRR!!!! scoring.

It's not that Hollywood has stopped making movies, it's more that it's taken to making the same movie over and over, using the same (expensive) visual cliches and script tropes. After a while the spectacle stops being spectacular. Incredible CGI turns into "Well, that's just CGI" visual filler.

LOTR was an exception because it was already well known. I'm fairly sure a Generic Fantasy Movie with similar effects would have crashed and burned.

If studios want to survive, they need to diversify by becoming less like corporate waterfall-management giants, and more like try-this-and-see experimental startups.

For the price of a single blockbuster, Hollywood could fund an entire generation of new directors/producers/writers.

Find ten or so promising YouTube shorts, give the production team a small budget and some prosumer equipment, get out of their way, and see what they do on a shoestring.

It isn't just about culture. It's like the form of entertainment has changed from being something like a theater production with deep and interesting characters to something like an amusement ride with friendly but not terribly interesting cliches.

As much as you want the movies to go back to the first, the people who are paying to go to the theater now are looking more for the second. Television has taken over most of the role that used to be for movies because it allows viewers even more time with interesting characters than a two hour movie.

No, I didn't mean the prequels.

Add Good Will Hunting to that list. It was made for around $10 million and generated $225 million at the box office.

Also My Big Fat Greek Wedding (got solid reviews at the time). $5 million budget, $368 million box office.

For an even more fascinating look for someone who is working the way he wants to work, in a budget that he can work with, see this keynote by Joe Swanberg at SXSW a couple years ago....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDMo0ax17E

CGI and visual effects are one way to attempt to mask the lack of a compelling story.

12 of the 20 top ROI movies of all time were made after 2000:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/68552/20-most-profitable-movi...

You mention two movies which made their budget back more than 10 times. It is safe to say that if there was a formula for creating movies which made the budget back 10x without the large financial risk the "tentpole"-movies with lots of expensive CGI carry, then Hollywood would do nothing else. But the fact is movies like these are the exception and cannot be manufactured.

It like saying to the gaming industry they should just write games like Tetris: Can be written in an afternoon and makes billions.

I think the real issue isn't that those movies don't have value to consumers, it's that anything other than an "event" movie doesn't get people into theatres. We can happily watch visual media with complex stories and characters from our living room.

Then, of course, there is the whole point about international distribution mentioned in the article. Movies for grown-ups literally don't translate well into other languages.

Why do we need to get people into theatres? I think half the reason they still exist in any great number is because they get time limited exclusivity. Now that a lot more people have huge TV's and decent sound systems theatres are even less compelling.

I'd much rather much just about any movie from the comfort of my couch, sitting in my undies (depending on company), with popcorn I made for 20c and the sound not drilling into my skull.

Theaters used to be the only way to watch movies, then they became just the best way, and now they're just an experience separate from home viewing.

Theaters exist because they're the biggest consumers of movies and, because they're the biggest consumers, studios give them limited time exclusivity exists to benefit their continued existence. It's a bit of a catch 22 and change is slow.

I watched Rogue one in a regular non-3D theater and the projection was not great. The black levels were horrible. The actual 24fps (x2) frame rate bothered me. I expect to watch it again at home, streamed from Netflix, and have better viewing experience.

> Theaters used to be the only way to watch movies, then they became just the best way, and now they're just an experience separate from home viewing.

When I can choose between going to a theater and paying +$10 just for the ticket and extremely marked up prices for popcorn and a soda (close to another $20) for a single individual, or I can wait 3-6 months, watch it in the privacy of my home without people bringing crying babies to an R-rated movie, talking during the movie, texting or otherwise using their phones during a movie, yeah, I'm going to wait until I can get it at home. The reasons movie theaters suck basically boils down to: 1. it's expensive, and 2. other people suck, are assholes, are completely self-centered and common courtesy no longer exists.

And they eat like pigs at a trough. I don't go to the cinema anymore, I can't endure the 'human' element in between the quiet moments on-screen.

Go to a matinee. I see most movies at 10 or 11 AM on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The theaters are usually no more than half-full. The ticket prices are about half-off, so I have over-priced popcorn for breakfast.

> they don't make films for grown-ups anymore.

In NYC there is an entire indie film district with four or five theaters within a few blocks. There is still good stuff being made, just not by Hollywood.

Is there a distro channel you can recommend to get access to some of this work?

Look for indie movie theaters in your area. I'm a little spoiled in that the town I grew up in had an amazing indie film theater (Cinema Arts Centre) and now I live in NYC where I can go to the IFC Center or Sunshine Cinemas to see indie films.

Cinema Arts Centre In Hton? i live here and its great! lol

Just look for French and Italian movies, for starters.

Of course, unless you prefer an independent community that does not revolve around French and Italians movies. :)

Bad recommendation. French movies also have their own industry just as poisoned as Hollywood.

Check out mubi and filmstruck. Mubi has 30 movies at any given time. Every day the oldest drops off and a new one gets added. I've watched many movies there that otherwise would have been on my to watch list forever. I've discovered incredible, small movies because of it. Filmstruck has an enormous catalog of indie and old movies. Unfortunately both services happen to end up buffering much more frequently on my devices than the big streaming services do. Might be my connection though.

> they don't make films for grown-ups anymore.

This right here is the truth, and it's been known for a while:

> " Adults were treated as adults rather than as overgrown children hell-bent on enshrining their own arrested development."

> "That leaves one quadrant—men under 25—at whom the majority of studio movies are aimed, the thinking being that they'll eat just about anything that's put in front of them as long as it's spiked with the proper set of stimulants. That's why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood—action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D—they're all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie."

> "the degree to which children's genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio ecutives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays."

From http://www.gq.com/story/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris which was written in 2011.

The best movie I've (finally) seen in recent months was El Mariachi. He made that for like $8K. Assault on Precinct 13 (the original one): $150,000. The list goes on and on. The Way of the Gun, a more recent favorite of mine with a bunch of big actors in it: $8.5M.

Another factor might be exorbitant star salaries. However, I think that's a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is that Hollywood is greedy. They won't touch a $10M film with no big stars in it because it's not likely to make an 8-figure profit.

Sounds like the real problem is that audiences disproportionately respond to big stars, so Hollywood disproportionately favors them.

Not really. It's just that spending that amount of money on a movie makes you really risk averse; you go for the actor with the good resume rather than the brilliant newcomer with no track record.

> The Way of the Gun

I'm fairly surprised that they were able to make that one so cheaply. Not only is it full of well known names, it was extremely well done (it's also a favorite of mine). I imagine most people involved didn't take their normal rate (or worked on residuals).

Great movies require great writing, and then good-to-great acting. CGI? None is fine, but if there is any, it also needs to be good-to-great.

Indeed, bad CG can ruin an otherwise great movie. My go-to example is the high-concept 2008 Mexican Sci-fi thriller Sleep Dealer - had the director simply chosen to have the biggest action setpieces happen off-screen or be otherwise implied, it might have been enough of a success to make back its modest 2.5M investment, but the abysmal CG they were able to get on that budget brought the whole film down.

I enjoyed babylon 5 a couple of years ago which has poor special effects by today's standards. The bad CGI did not detract from it at all.

Hey, it had poor visual effects by its day's standards as well! Great writing though.

I thought they were cutting edge at the time,everyone else was still using scale models weren't they?

It was cutting edge technology, but looked inferior to the physical models used by shows like Star Trek TNG or DS9 (I say sadly as a huge B5 fan).

I was a Star Trek fan back in the day and the effects were one of the reasons I never gave the show a fair chance. It just looked so low quality compared to the practical effects in other shows.

It wasn't cutting edge at the time. I started doing pro VFX about that time. What was revolutionary with their VFX though was that they were using Lightwave (and Amigas, presumably PCs later too) which cheapened their VFX workflow by a significant margin. Workstations and software at the time were a significant cost. Like, REAL SIGNIFICANT.

> Great movies require great writing, and then good-to-great acting.

I would argue against that last part; great movies do require great writing, but you can get good to great performances out of mediocre actors if you have a great director. No amount of good acting will overcome a bad director.

Depending on the episode, Black Mirror uses tons of CGI, but it's usually subtle and the focus is always the story, which is simply served by the effects, not the other way around.

> "I expect interesting movies"

I'd say you want an interesting but expect incredible production values

Which is to say I don't think it's a situation of expect in the sense of demanding but rather "expect" in the sense of "habituated to".

Production values might not be the explicit choice of that many people but a good proportion of people would choose X movie with high production values over X movie without. And that's something that's reliable. Things like plot, character and dialog are hit-and-miss if you are looking for quality. Not that they can't sell but they can't reliably sell.

Altogether, "grooming" gets added to everything because it can reliably move people's choices a little bit. Other factors may influence people more, other factors may be what people say they want but a lot of these factors are less reliable, there are a lot of factors where a change might turn as many people off as it attracts but surface unambiguous can be added. And there-in lies the secret of the mass-market surface appearance arms race (similar to the music "loudness wars").

> I'd say you want an interesting but expect incredible production values

Smoke was an interesting movie, and cost $7M. (It didn't make much more but it wasn't a failure.)

Moon was a fantastic movie, and cost $5M. The little CGI it had was pretty obvious but didn't affect the viewing experience. (It also made near-zero returns.)

Requiem for a Dream was - and remains - an outstanding film. It flopped in box office but must have made pretty penny on home sales.

Dead Man is an interesting movie, and still one of my favourites. It works on the audience for the same reason Apocalypse Now does: episodic films in general are considered "artsy" and hard to chew, but turn them into thoughtful road movies and the audience enjoys the experience.

Pan's Labyrinth is just damn good. It cost €13.5 to make, and grossed $37M. Home sales must have added even more since then.

All the films above are both interesting and, in terms of bloated Hollywood budgets, were cheap to make. I would take any one of them over the perfumed sewage that floods the film theaters. And for reference, I did see Doctor Strange in a cinema so I do have a metric for calibration. My opinion stands.

Snowpiercer was stellar. 40 million.

But what percentage of viewers do you represent?

It hursts. But you are right.

A pretty small percentage, obviously. The top grossing movies of 2016 were Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, The Secret Life of Pets, and The Jungle Book. All of these movies would be impossible to do without CGI.

Viewers want movies to be spectacles. If we're watching something in a theater, we have high expectations of the production value. Otherwise, why even waste the time and money going to a theater? We can watch the "good", low production value movies at home.

I think the home is starting to turn into the movie theater. It's fairly common to see 4k 55" TVs in people's homes; I'm wondering how far they can take the sizes for a residential area. The accompanying sound systems for these home theaters are high quality as well. I guess it's an arms race to out-spectacle what you can get out of an increasingly performant screen from Samsung, et al.

This is a good point, the experience at the theater used to be drastically different that what you'd get at home (VHS, non-widescreen, stereo audio, etc), but the gap is certainly closing. Combine that with highway robbery concession prices, being surrounded by a bunch of strangers... the theater is starting to look less appealing.

    > Rogue One: A Star Wars Story… would be impossible to do without CGI.

It's a prequel to a movie that had exactly one computer generated element in it, which was a wireframe model that took so long to render that they couldn't re-render it when the final design changed.

They _chose_ not to make it without CGI. It wouldn't have been impossible.

edit: I'll just leave this right here - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034928/

> It's a prequel to a movie that had exactly one computer generated element in it

Well, no, it's a prequel to the 1997 version, not the 1977 version you describe.

In what way? It didn't contradict the 1977 version in any way (that I'm aware of). It's been nearly 20 years since I've seen the 1997 version (we watch the 1993 version at home). Had you never seen the special editions, rogue one would not appear out of place.

He's saying that the original move we've all seen had its special effects upgraded over the years :)

I understood his point; mine was that _I_ don't watch the 1997 (or later) version of Star Wars (though I've seen it). My children have only seen the 1993 release of Star Wars. If my son was old enough, he'd watch Rogue One and have no issues having never seen the "upgraded" releases.

The original still had big budget special effects, only the technology changed. So I think that's being a bit pedantic.

My point was that they would not have been impossible without CGI. All four of those movies could have been made prior to the mid-80s, with different technology. I chose Rogue One and Jungle Book because one comes from a family of movies that excelled in practical effects, optical compositing, and modeling and the other has a version which was made in the 1940s.

Decades ago, Finding Dory would have been hand animated (though, even that had moved begun moving to computers in the late 80s). I haven't seen Captain America, but I would guess similar types of movies existed before hand (the 80s and early 90s are full of over the top action movies and practical effects; some of which still hold up today).

Visual story telling doesn't require CGI. It might be the most pragmatic way to do things now (due to time, cost, complexity, etc.), but it's not the _only_ way.

I'll take low-effect, nice plot Ex Machina over pretty much every over-CGI'd, Power Ranger plot scifi/superhero Hollywood film in recent memory.

Ex Machina had hella CGI, it won an academy award for their visual effects!

If it's done right, CGI disappears.

But the costs certainly don't. :)

Ex Machina's budget was around $15 million, that's extremely low.

"Zodiac" is a great example of that[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sZS8OVyVr4

I didn't realize how much of the sets in Game of Thrones are done on computer until I watched a making-of for one of the seasons. Even knowing, I can't tell when watching.

Ex Machina had huge amounts of effects. CGI is a case of "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

One of the three principle characters had a transparent body through much of the film. It amazes me people could think it was light on GGI, or not be sure anything had been done.

But it had a tiny ($15m) budget, which is opposite of what this thread is saying is possible (lots of CG, not much money).

You're right. But I did enjoy movies like The Martian (2015), and Gravity (2013).

if you expect anything but production value in a movie, you haven't been watching movies recently.

Lol, winter oscar-bait season is supposed to be their offering to that market. Too bad all those movies are the same too.

CGI exists for international viewers...

Who can't appreciate nuanced localized plotlines.

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