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Comment by racl101 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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