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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

But what percentage of viewers do you represent?

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.

It hursts. But you are right.

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