How will movies, as we know them, survive the next ten years?
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The experience of good food, drinks and great curated movies is awesome. It's not just going to the movies, it's an evening out. I hope they continue to do well, and when they do decide to come to my town, I'll be there very often.
Last movie I saw there was Black Panther. Instead of ads before the movie, they had a retrospective/documentary on the history of Black Panther in the comics.
They know movies, and do them right.
I really just want the best screen and nice seats, and sad as it may be, it's really just the big cineplex chains that deliver on that. As far as movie curation goes, that's certainly a weakness of the big chains, but at least in SF I have been shocked at the variety of foreign/indie/classic films that show up at the AMC and Cinemark if you pay attention to showtimes.
And that isn’t the allure anyway. The people who run Alamo have concentrated so hard on customer experience that it’s almost embarrassing to the other theaters.
1) Nobody takes your ticket. Buy it online and walk directly to your seat.
2) no advertisements for liposuction of real estate before the movie starts. The media playing while you wait is interesting clips that are relevant to the movie you are about to watch. When I saw “hackers” there, it was a bunch of hilarious old computer ads from the 90s, music videos of the soundtrack, etc.
3) if you talk, text, or arrive late you get kicked out. People follow this rule.
4) There might be some alternative revenue stream[1] but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like you exchange money for a ticket to a movie.
Honestly Alamo feel less hip, and more like it’s run by cranky old cinema buffs that want you to shut up and pay attention during the movie. It’s like a theater for adults.
[1] at other theaters it feels like they don’t care about you buying a ticket, and the ticket is really just an excuse to sell you extremely expensive popcorn.
The Cinemark at the Westfield Mall also has fairly recent new seats, and their XD screens are quite nice.
So yes, I'm spoiled, but I've honestly never even given much thought about attending a showing at the Alamo Drafthouse because I'm fairly sure it can't compete.
Wow that’s a dark thought when you say it out loud isn’t it?
Not that San Francisco needs any more stuff to make it seem even more distopian.
Again, there are enough family-friendly places that exist that you don't need to fret for the future generations not spending their childhood playing street hockey on Broadway.
I know this as I play rec. Volleyball during the winter, and they are always held at local school's gyms.
While I agree the west side of midtown doesn't have many though... (Hells Kitchen/Chelsea/West Village) as they are not necessary family friendly areas.
Same for Brooklyn, While you maybe not see any in Williamsburg, If you go to Park Slope, it is stroller nation..... you'd be out of place if you are young and single...
just saying...
These do exist in cities - for example even in central London.
I would honestly go way more often if they had intermissions.
See, with marvel and superhero movies and with chick flicks and raunchy over-the-top comedies, who are they targeting? You? Give me a break!
They are targeting the youth! The ones 16-22, you know the ones who are mostly students and have awkward social lives to begin with and the ones who are likely to religiously follow the movies, later buy the related merchandise and talk about it for long time in their gatherings.
And for kids below 16, there is a healthy stream of cartoon movies that Pixar, Disney and the like keep doling out to the masses -- case in point, the next Toy Story or Pets movie.
Because for that age group (22 and under), cinema is the biggest bang for the buck AND the cheapest night-out with friends (spend around 10 dollars for movie ticket followed by cheap pizza slice and can of cold drink before heading home).
I’d wager this is a US specific thing due to the heavy regulation of servings alcohol. One Europe even McDonalds and Disneyland serve alcoholic drinks, you’d be hard pressed to find a movie theater that doesn’t.
According to MPAA stats, the most frequent moviegoers are 18-39. https://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MPAA-Theatri...
Some of that is the population, but 24% of tickets sold went to the 25-39 demo, compared to 16% of 18-24. 40% of tickets are sold to people 24 and under, and 60% of tickets of is >24.
You're right on this, I usually go to the 'adult only' theater near me where I can order a beer and a really good hamburger to eat while I enjoy a movie in a cushy lounging chair. These things have been popping up all over the country and I bet it's helped bring adults back to movie theaters.
I do enjoy Pixar movies though. It seems those are always packed for the 21-over crowd too.
But, regardless of efficiency from a cost perspective, that's not why people get home theater systems. They get home theater systems because they don't like watching movies in movie theaters, and so they can have better experiences watching stuff at home.
If you're not intensely annoyed by experience of seeing movies in (typical) movie theaters, then the #1 reason a lot of people get home theater systems isn't applicable to you. When I was a student, seeing movies in crowded theaters never bothered me, but they seem to get more annoying every year. That's probably not the theaters getting worse (they seem to be getting better even?), rather that's just me getting older and my annoyance getting amplified as a result. You experience the same annoyances 1000x, sometimes they cease to be annoyances, or sometimes they become even more annoying each time. Eventually it adds up and you're suddenly a grumpy old person like me who hates crowded movie theaters.
The more modern superhero or cartoony 3D movies are often designed to appeal to a fairly broad audience.
So I think that's really what film as a medium is going to be in future. It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that.
Or okay, maybe indie cinema may exist on the fringes or something. But fact is, the industry has probably got to accept that low/medium budget films are pretty much history, and they've been replaced entirely by streaming services and sites like YouTube.
Still, it's not all bad news. No, if you want bad news, that's probably the future of television. That's on the way out right now, is probably going to completely supplanted by streaming services like Netflix in future, and as a format has pretty much no advantages over the internet whatsoever. Seriously, could you imagine trying to selling the experience of watching TV in a society that already has the internet? You couldn't. It objectively be a worse solution for most people.
So yeah, I think film is probably gonna be reduced a bunch of blockbuster films by large studios mixed with some arthouse works, and TV is probably just going to be completely replaced by streaming services and video sharing platforms.
That's mostly been me with going to theaters for a very long time. And I do watch a fair number of movies.
Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically.
Anecdotally, many years ago, I was in the film group at school and we had 4 different movies over a weekend, filled large auditoriums etc. My understanding is that there are now occasional film showings but, as a whole, this doesn't exist any longer.
A lot of going out to see movies in a theater is habit. Take the habit away and you can see a big fropoff.
Lower-budget productions, in general, are increasingly being produced as cable or streaming TV shows instead of movies nowadays.
Vox even did an article on the phenomenon the other day, pointing out that it's resulted in a number of shows being poorly-paced because they were originally written to be movies before they were padded out to be TV shows: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/19/18660602/tv-streaming-...
Coming soon: "Delivery Option: Save $5 on your next ticket at Amazon Cinema by having this package delivered directly to your nearest theater!"
:s/Victory/Amazon/g
Good stuff right here. Scary that all of these things are a real possibility.
Cinematography genius!
Edit: I would still pay $$$
What was really clever about it was that Drafthouse was playing the previous week’s episode without commercials while the new one aired, then edited out the commercials for the current week’s episode and played it right after.
Those were good times.
I imagine Amazon and Netflix will look to a similar strategy with movie theatres in order to boost demand for both individual films and their services in general.
I wish that I at least liked the one thing that was what the whole world apparently decided all at once was the only way to do things.
I'm not even that snobby but I think these films are garbage from the perspective of what I've liked about movies over the last 60 years.
The reason "movie-theatre movies" are the way they are, is that everything that's not a "movie-theatre movie", people would rather watch on Netflix.
I find myself loathing the listed run times of 1 and a half to 2 and a half hours, while I'll gladly watch a miniseries on Netflix where each episode is just as long.
I'm usually thinking: how are they going to cut corners on character development this time, jam pack the action scenes and twist in, without me feeling exhausted of the whole ordeal?
I like the theatres because many of my living arrangements weren't conducive to turning the sound up so high that I can feel it in my body
but now, I catch most theatrical releases while on planes - which may be unique to me - and just regret every time I actually do go to the theatre.
Boy, you'd really be put out by classical theatre and opera (and commedia dell'arte, and rakugo, and...). Everyone in the audience of such shows has likely already seen the exact same story performed before, line for line! (And don't get me started about church services...)
Seriously, though: sometimes the point isn't to tell you something new, but to deliver a polished retelling of a well-known story that the production company loves, for a new audience.
Cinemark started a revolution when they invented stadium seating (but even then, the original incarnation was problematic because it wasn't wheelchair-accessible until Cinemark settled with the DOJ).
That's why this model can work fine for niche live events that few people want but not so much for mass market live broadcasts. It's this reason that you've got to caveat "TV Shows" vs "Live TV" when you make that statement.
"Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't.
If anything, I'd see the major broadcast networks and ESPN continuing to get stronger, while everything else on TV gets weaker.
The only TV shows that people have to watch "live" are shows with a community built around them, ready to react and discuss it as it's happening (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc). This is where movie audiences are similar because that opening weekend crowd for an anticipated movie tends to share the experience.
I honestly wish they'd bring back midnight showings instead of 7pm Thursday showings, because that midnight crowd energy is impossible to replicate.
The technical solution for that is multicast.
The internet doesn't really support multicast, but there are workarounds; the best known is BAMTech, which grew out of live streaming MLB baseball and was purchased for $1B in 2016 by Disney.
I have no idea how they do it, but I imagine it's not that different from Netflix. Put a box in ISP's everywhere that acts like a multi-user PVR. One stream per channel going in to the box, thousands going out.
Um, no? You could argue that it isn't technically caching, and the system doing it isn't technically a CDN, but there's no reason why a broadcast can't be streamed to, say, 1000 SDN nodes, which each spool the stream in memory and serve it to 1000+ different recievers. A SDN node (server) is different infrastructure than a television station, so there might be issues with capital outlay, but I highly doubt it's more expensive once sunk costs are tallied.
The current value proposition of a theatrical release is primarily in the big screen and the big auditorium, and secondarily the access to content(which can be seen on screens of many sizes). This was basically also true when VCRs took hold, and it drove the wave of late-20th century blockbusters; it's only different now in that the value of the theater is more niche, and there are fewer barriers to wide distribution.
IMHO the thing that could support theaters going forward is a common 21st century theme: customization and unbundling. Keep it a primarily passive audience experience(we've seen the "interactive movie" trope before), but introduce an element of performance and "VJing", taking the emphasis off making one prerecorded film and moving it towards remixable material inside a common framework. Given that so many big releases now are CGI-centric, the production pipelines are already in striking distance of doing this, and live effects can supplement it. It just needs the intersection of technical capability against a business model open to this structuring of IP and talent - which might put it out of reach of the current studios but create opportunities for new ones.
In a fractured world where everybody has different truths and things they have seen, TV may be the one factor that ensures everybody at least have access to the same stories, even if they disagree with them.
Of course that is the experience before cable tv, not the experience of having 9000 channels, and none of them worth watching.
About twenty years ago, some co-workers were predicting that home theater technology would make the public movie theater obsolete. My counter-arguments at the time were that there would always be room for seeing movies with the best possible light and sound (better than the best home theaters), and there would always be room for seeing movies together, not just your friends, but a large group. I feel like there's something special about sharing the audience reaction (FTA,"That social aspect of sharing a movie with friends and strangers and family, that’s such a strong part of our tradition."). There's certainly something special about seeing a movie with a date who's not yet comfortable coming to your house. I don't, yet, see a reason to update my viewpoint. Movies will survive.
Are people spending less or more? How are individual movies doing, and movies in general?
Or: how big is the pie, and how big are the slices?
It is not a matter of "if" this day will come, but simply "when". I think 10-15 years is very possible. We'll have audio software that generates all the music we could want in a single app, have a single book app that generates any novel in any genre we want, or creates videos/movies we want from a single application. How could humans compete with their 1-5 movies a year against a computer app that could generate 5 movies a minute?
I think it could easily find its way into Youtube first, as there is much less to lose, and far more to gain, from short videos that capture attention. With apps used by content creators to create music, or help with VFx, etc, to eventually generating entirely new videos without requiring the content creator to do any work, and they will jump at the chance if it gets them more subscribers.
There will come a day, when there is a really popular film, that was completely created by a computer. That day will come not in a 100 years, but in the next decade or two.
I've sat out of the whole superhero franchise for, what, over a decade or so now? Can't stand movies-by-the-numbers.
Here in Reno, the Cinemark chain put in the luxury loungers (far fewer seats per theater) and seat selection. With the movie club, you pay $8/movie for all tickets plus get a discount on snacks. Honestly, that's pretty fair.
I hate the superhero moment we're living through right now... some likable actors don't seem to show up ind event movies anymore because they're cashing the DC/MCU checks.
What I wish every time I go to a theater:
* Ditch the stupid Coca-Cola commercials. If we have to sit through those every time we have to go to a theater, we stop going to a theater.
* Theaters are set up for digital nowadays, per Fandom and certain fight events. Dig up some legacy films and show indie/classics/other films far more often. Or, make sure other movies play, even during the day on weekend... the theater is empty, why didn't Apollo 11 ever play in my town?
* Fix your movie chain marketing emails. They all, universally, suck.
* Tell us when the movie starts, not when you start the advertising (yeah, I know it's 15 minutes of trailers/commercials).
Not even to go into the "some movies would be better as HBO/ Netflix/ Showtime series" ...
Heh, now there's a new promotion opportunity: "Show up at the theater and your party is the only one there? Select what movie you want to be shown from our immense backlog!" Sort of like no-show ticket deals on flights.
But compete by giving more flexibility about time and selection. Maybe even offer blockbuster TV shows, so you can book a Stranger Things party with a group.
I think IP licensing might be the biggest problem there, which would mean that Hollywood is stepping on its own tail to some degree.
I know where I live, these kinds of theaters are still doing quite well, and thrive off of showing smaller films, sometimes with Q&A events w/ filmmakers. They even do showings of classic films via 35mm prints they can get their hands on.
I know this isn't just some local thing either. I know it's happening in the DC/Baltimore, Detroit, LA, and SF area, as well as here in Colorado...
I just tried to figure out whether I'd recommend any of the Marvel films on their own raw merit to someone without interest in the whole series and... no? Maybe Guardians of the Galaxy 2 if you like sci-fi. Solid theme, better writing than most, fairly good humor. Maybe the first Iron Man since it stands alone pretty well and it's not too hard to just stop there, satisfied, having basically seen what about half the rest of the movies do (god, there are what, 22 or 23 now?), entirely. Interesting perspective to think about them from.
If you have any interest in Marvel superheroes whatsoever I'd recommend Into the Spiderverse as the best single movie they've put out. It's animated, not part of their live-action "universe".
But yeah, none of it's Hitchcock or Renoir, at all. Or even upper-tier Spielberg. Well, maybe Into the Spiderverse hits almost that level, at least.
[EDIT] I don't mean to be too harsh to them, overall they're an incredible achievement in consistency, with only a couple being truly terrible (my attempt to give Thor 2 a second chance was... not successful, only made it about 30 minutes) which is pretty nuts, even for by-the-numbers filmmaking. At least four of the five Avengers entries are maybe the most flawlessly-executed high fan service in the history of ever (2 was a bit of a misstep—pulled their punches, I think, though even it's just shy of belonging with the others). But yeah, "would you recommend any of these to a film fan, not a blockbuster movies fan, who doesn't want to sit through 50 hours to see the whole thing?". That's a toughy. Maybe those couple, that's about it.
Iron Man is probably as good a choice as any for a standalone Marvel film.
One problem is that the template for a modern big budget action film, which includes all the superhero films, weighs things down with so many explosions and special effects and just non-stop action sequences that they're all a bit exhausting and tend to overwhelm any humor or character interactions on the screen.
Rogue One was a frustrating near-miss. Leaning into genre tropes adjacent to those that were such a part of Star Wars (the original gigantic genre-pastiche film) was such a good idea, and man, it almost worked. I think they just didn't quite have enough confidence in that idea and hedged their bets too much, and of course couldn't resist doing the Interminably Long Gigantic Big Explosions Action Scene. That aside, the fleet arriving and immediate aftermath of that is maybe the only time any of the new movies have given me childlike "Star Wars Feels" like several of the moments in the original trilogy do, so there's that.
All the others seem to be a formulaic blend of running, shouting, shooting, CGI explodium, cartoon villains of astounding power and limited emotional depth, wisecracks™, on-the-nose moralising, and fresh-out-of-the-can sentiment.
But these movies sell. More thoughtful slower movies don't. It's a feedback loop. The studios pander to teen/young adult audiences, older audiences stay away, and the movies become younger, teenier, and less and less distinctive.
It's because it's interrupted. It has 30s of that, then it stops, have a minute of slower scenes, and then go for another 30s of action. It's probably cheaper too.
That could be dull but, crucially, each of these differs from the others, whether by significantly varying the setting, or the way the characters fight, or the sort of bad guy they're fighting. It's also excellent at both short and long term setup and payoff, at least in minor ways, several times completing such an arc in a single scene—which is what you're supposed to do in just about any scene if you can swing it, of course, but many filmmakers seem to forget that, especially once the CGI explosions start. It may be paint by numbers but at least they, you know, actually paint every number, as if they are, if nothing else, very good and professional number-painters.
Contrast, say, Man of Steel, where it's mostly just one or the other of two dudes getting smashed or laser-blasted through/onto something hard, over, and over, and over. Or Age of Ultron, which has more variety and setup/payoff than Man of Steel (not a high bar to top), but is still way worse—clumsier and more slapdash, might be a good way to put it—than Avengers.
[EDIT] and yes of course you're very much correct, the pacing of the final fight in Avengers is part of the variety that keeps it from becoming a slog. The plotting and editing work on that whole sequence is damn impressive. It could probably be the main subject of a whole class on modern action storytelling in film—if you for some reason can't just use the entirety of Mad Max: Fury Road as your key work instead.
Black Panther is probably the first one to watch as a standalone.
Captain America: The First Avenger wouldn't be a bad recommendation either (and follow it up with the Agent Carter TV series, which is one of the finest examples of dieselpunk I've seen).
Into the Spiderverse is absolutely great as well.
We also have an outstanding second-run within walking distance of our house - a 1950s-built theater that has been meticulously maintained and never cut up, so it has comfy seats, great sound, and a gigantic screen. It fills up in the evenings, mostly neighborhood people walking there, so it has a community feel.
There are other variations of "art house theater" in town too, all doing pretty well. They're not the ones suffering. It's the chain theaters at the mall that are suffering.
Sure, I live in hipster paradise (aka Minneapolis), but you can find similar facilities at many other cities.
I work in the arts and I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I know who have been to a theatre to see something smaller than "Hamilton".
The internet is here so everything must scale. If you're not serving a billion people you're a failure.
One anecdote to consider:
Back in 2005 I went to India on business. While there in the city of Hyderabad, a local contractor that I was working with invited me to visit the village where his grandparents lived. We went to the village which was several hours drive from Hyderabad (something like 8 hours or more ... I don't remember exactly). The village was a completely different environment than Hyderabad ... very humid, but green and beautiful. And very few people spoke English there (which is relevant as you'll see).
In that village there was a kind of communal video hall run by a local entrepreneur. He basically had computer projector (I think it was 720p resolution ... nothing fancy) connected to a computer and a rudimentary PA system.
Starting at around 6pm or so, after people in the village had had their supper, he would start showing films. It was whatever he felt like showing or whatever people paid him to play.
My host was kind of a big man in the village, since he was from the city, and much more well to do. He was shown a lot of deference. My host asked the theater owner to play a movie that I would enjoy ... and the theater owner decided to play Rambo.
It was very clear that everyone in the village had seen the movie before ... probably many times before.
People talked with each other during the film. Some of the men were smoking (which I wasn't a fan of). And it was hot and humid.
But god damn if it wasn't the best action movie screening of my life. Everyone was commenting and cheering for Stallone ... and nobody knew what the hell Stallone was saying directly ... but there was kind of a really bad audio running in Telugu on top of the English audio ... which I can only assume was a local translation recorded over the original audio.
At one point Stallone has a bow and arrow and shoots a guy with a grenade tip ... and the guy explodes. Not something I'd want my kid to see ... but there were kids from 5 to 15 cheering and hollering like he'd scored a goal in a tournament or something.
Really an enjoyable experience.
Maybe we just need smaller, nearer, more locally tailored theaters.
How Will the Movies (As We Know Them) Survive the Next 10 Years?
I think big tent pole movies will still be there because they bring in the audience.
Small budget horror movies will exist because even if they didn't make money they didn't cost a lot of money. I think the medium priced movies are going to in trouble.
People complain about why all we get are remakes and superhero movies, it appears people aren't going to see new IP in 80-130 million dollar range.
We might as long as it's an adaptation from a medium with a lower barrier to entry, e.g. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings.
I don't need to go to cinema to see drama or comedy or anything else, I can easily do that from the comfort of my own house.
Plus A-List is really cheap
I think there are two ways forward: return to the crummy old theater model of playing classic movies day and night (why don't any multiplexes have 1 screen dedicated to this?) Curation is key as well as choice. It would be bice when there are 8 crappy movies at the theater to see "Die Hard" and "The Godfather" playing so there is always an option for people that just want a night out.
Which is the second point: movie theaters are one of the last remaining "things to do" on a normal night that is kid-friendly and group-friendly. Malls are gone (or profoundly dead) and movie theaters are one of the last options. Although I feel like the concept of "going out" is itself maybe dying.
Heck, even the crappier (2nd class) malls have been putting on the proverbial lipstick and targeting hip food retailers thus inviting younger crowds dating and chilling.
The only malls that seem to die off are the ones who were opened in places which are not progressing economically (for example low-income neighborhoods) and they never took off to begin with nor has the neighborhood improved economically.
But you don't even need to go to low income areas. The mall that is nearest me in a smaller city about 40 miles from Boston has anchor stores that are pretty much all retail chains that are cratering (Sears, JC Penny, Toys R'Us). The grocery store and Home Depot in the complex are always busy but the actual mall and other small stores are a ghost town. It's not exactly an upscale area but it's not depressed. (Heck, there are Tesla chargers in the parking lot.)
You can search for an Apple Store or Nordstrom’s and find the wealthy part of town wherever the mall they are in is located. Also works with Whole Foods and a couple other stores.
We lost or are losing a bunch of malls, but there are also a small handful that are thriving. Prestonwood, Valley View, and Collin Creek may be dead or dying, we still have Stonebriar, NorthPark, and the Galleria doing very well. There are fewer malls, sure, but the ones we have left are thriving.
Of course, Dallas is one of the most thoroughly suburban parts of the country. Sure, there are a small handful of people moving to places like Uptown or Oak Cliff, but the northern suburbs are still booming, and almost everyone I went to college with who's still in the area either lives in a suburban apartment complex, or if they're financially successful, bought a house in the exurbs. And even if a good chunk of twentysomethings are moving to the city, there are still all the teenagers living with their parents in the suburbs. And for that matter, there are twentysomething adults who are living in the suburbs with their parents because their careers haven't taken off.
What's happening in bigger cities is consolidation; lots of dead malls and empty stores but a few key retail locations are booming. The neighborhood mall, where you might go to hang out, is gone.
The trend right now in Vancouver is to combine malls with condo complexes although none are finished enough to see if that will be a success.
I agree in general that sprawling shopping centers have tended to replace a fair number of indoor malls. That probably mostly reflects the ascendancy of big box stores over small specialty retailers for mainstream consumers.
What would draw me back would be a really high class experience with great films, great food, alcoholic drinks, a beautiful classy interior, and maybe a bar downstairs for a drink or two after the film. That could overall make a real lovely evening of the entertainment. Add in a creche/dog sitting to make it parent friendly. Don't know if it's economically viable though.
The fact that critics, a very insular group of people, liked the movie doesn't mean it is good or will please the public at large. Booksmart is a prime example of the « Get woke, go broke » adage.
> When you have a movie that’s as entertaining, well-made, and well-received as “Ghostbusters (2016)” not doing the business it should have [the teen comedy underperformed at the box office despite critics’ raves],
Once deepfake tech is so good that we can create hyper-realistic performances at a fraction of the cost (both in terms of effects and salary), the game is really on.
Over time big studios and fans alike will adjust to the idea that a movie doesn't need real actors to be good. Maybe it needs real actors to sell the star system Hollywood has milked since the 20's. But they don't need to be present for filming, and salaries will adjust accordingly.
Many ticket-selling actors will just become celebrity icons and nothing more. You thought the lip-syncing phenomenon of celebrity pop acts during the 80's-00's was bad? Just wait until we are having the conversation about whether an actor can really act or if it's just CG.
In fact, many small studios will survive because of this; like the underground music scene, they will represent "real" cinema with "real" acting. But this will come with massive paycuts and lifestyle adjustments. And higher ticket prices for fans of real cinema.
Underground acting will become what theatre is now: a chance to test your meddle and artistic credibility, at the cost of fame and fortune.
It's crazy that something as artistically extravagant as movie-making scarcely lasted a century, compared to other mediums.
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was released in 1896. By 2026 the days of real cinema will be in rapid decline, and if the progress made in the last two decades are any indication, by 2046 it will be all but gone from big studio productions.
It has pretty big implications for film awards as well. Can an actor get an award if their performance was altered? What does good directing mean if they don't have to get the actors to perform as well as it ends up on the screen?
It's as if their target person, whose lack of access to the actual movie festivals where these films are first shown, is made whole by urban theatres in culturally-thriving cities, with these theatres serving as a democratizing force of access, so that the viewer can ponder the topics and messages in the film and reflect on its lessons for themselves and their communities -- while they seem oblivious to the fact that technology and online distribution have democratized access not just for dopamine-cravers whose tastes they seemingly find lacking, but also for their target groups.
The fact is, in the history of public art and entertainment, there has never been a time where access to one's idealized audience was easier. Some filmmakers have demonstrated that they can successfully leverage these new channels to make their works have more of an impact, than they would have had otherwise, while others seem to writhe in discomfort as they try to articulate their displeasure with a world that no longer matches their preferred where of scarcity was the norm, their societal role was clearly seen as provoking emotion and critical thought, and they had leverage over the venues that would dole out the privilege of this access.
Movie production costs have gotten so low that online streaming is quickly becoming the predominant model. These low costs allow streaming studio heads to diversify across genres and take lots of small risks, which ultimately reduce me the risk to the production company. This increased risk tolerance allows them to give up almost all creative control to the writers, actors and directors. A-list actors and directors are willing to give up a lot of money to get that creative control, so the streaming services still recruit top talent.
But by far the biggest cost difference is marketing. The only way studios can justify a $50M marketing budget for a movie is if that marketing also drives additional commercial activity outside of theatrical attendance (games, merch, anticipated sequels, etc.) Streaming services can benefit from a constant, consolidated marketing budget: they can advertise the “new movie of the week” with a sustained ad buy over time while still retaining the brand advertising uplift for the entire service. Global distribution is also waaaaay easier for streaming services.
Ultimate takeaway though is that the window release model is dead. Everyone in the media industry has known this for years; and I think that we’ll look back at 2019 as the year that really started to happen for real.
http://collider.com/movie-ticket-price-inflation-statistics/
We seem to be moving away from communal space as a society in USA (failing malls, theaters, and other community shopping/work/recreation spaces). I'm not a fan anymore of isolating every human needs/experiences and charging a service for each (Netflix, Tinder, Facebook, Grubhub, texting).
We should also ask ourself if high budget comedies are really necessary. You could do Austin Powers on a cheap budget and it would probably only reduce the quality a bit. So maybe it's not the end of the world if the Austin Powers movies of the future are lower budget and on TV.
Before modern technology there was major overhead, to both consumer and producer, when selecting any single piece of media. Producers had to acquire expensive filming equipment, go through an arduous editing process, and negotiate distribution. Consumers had to pick out what they were going to watch next, possibly travel to a venue, or at least jump through a bunch of hoops to load the next playback media.
It would make sense for the economics to bias towards long-form video media, even in the face of consumer preference for short-form. It would be absurd to release a 2 minute feature film to play in theaters. It'd even be absurd to schedule a 2 minute broadcast television slot. Even a 2 minute video is pushing it on a streaming service, unless there's a very good algorithm that the user's happy to delegate auto-playback to. Otherwise the overhead of picking the next video is on par with the video length itself.
Maybe most of us would prefer just to watch a hundred one minute videos, instead of a single full-length movie. It's just the technology to make this happen is just arriving now. Again, I'm not sure if it's true. But if you're in media, you definitely can't blind yourself to this possibility.
Theater movies have usually simple story.
Short-form media has always been harder to monetize. We've had the technology for a long time to sell individual short stories, articles, etc. It doesn't seem to work very well. (Tangent. Why can't I buy an arbitrary short story on Kindle?) Most authors of 300 page books don't make much money either but there does seem to still be a fairly robust writing and publishing pipeline there.
Have also noticed Fox Searchlight has been recently acquiring short films out of the past few film fests. Believe they're making those avail on their YouTube channel.
Think it's much easier for people to consume 25min chunks across 2 seasons (6 episodes each) than a full-length film.
If that's true then it might speak to more than just entertainment consumption. It would mirror a trend in other areas like social media where before you would have long form blogs that went to facebook posts and now to shorter tweets. Maybe it's a collective attention deficit disorder given to us by the constant distractions of modern technology.
Among other things I do, I'm involved with content marketing/social media/etc. and there's quantitive evidence that viewing/reading is tilting towards shorter content in all forms. That's a bit different from entertainment that someone seeks out. But I suspect you have similar forces at work.
So I don't think the problem is that long-form is undesired.
I'm waiting for the first theatrical release in vertical video.
Matthew Ball's Netflix series is a great companion: https://redef.com/original/netflix-misunderstandings-pt-1-ne...
Seriously jarring. When you see a different culture trying to do them, it makes you realise just how just how unconvincingly stiff and nationalistic those tropes are.
I don't know if that was deliberate. If it was, it was a much cleverer movie than it appeared to be.
Here's an extremely relevant article about Hollywood. [2] Hollywood has been one of the earliest adopters of active utilization and commercialization of "AI technologies". Scripts are actively analyzed using machine learning systems to try to predict profits. Guess what the AI says? Stuff that made money in the past will keep making money, and things that didn't won't. And what do we get out of Hollywood? Repetitive rubbish whose only novelty is tossing in some identity politics to, in this article's phrasing, offer a "more representative portrayal of the world in which we live."
More to the point, think about some of the all time greatest movies (as well as money makers). Here's [3] a list of the top 10 by gross. Tellingly, only 3 of the top 10 were made after 2000. But now consider the other films - Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, ET, The Ten Commandments, etc. These films were all, if not extremely unique, certainly not derivative rubbish. Now look at the 21st century films and you'll see a whole bunch of generic superhero movies and sequels. Even if not the product of AI, it's certainly the product of a mindset that's no different than a profit oriented regression analysis of the past - the less glorified truism of what "AI analysis" is.
Maybe the biggest problem with Hollywood is summed by one sentence in the AI article I referenced: “[AI analysis] takes a lot of the risk out of what I do.” No, it just makes you comfortable releasing crap that you'd otherwise recognize as crap. Interestingly the producer that gave that quote ended up releasing two mega-flops after the article and has not released anything since. It's not like we've even scratched the surface of possible ideas, but Hollywood has become uncreative, lazy, and averse to any and all risk - to the point that they'd rather drown than try something else, so long as it happens slowly.
[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/solving-eq...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...
You see the same in tech. It’s been a long time since the biggest players have done much innovative stuff.
I think that sums up the problem with AI in general.
The real story so far of "AI" is about human desire to avoid responsibility for their actions. It is about saying "the magic box said you were a terrorist, nothing I can do about it" or, in this case, "The magic box said it should make a lot of money, I dunno what happened."
It is about the limited liability corporation gaining the ability to act semi-autonomously, with the profits going to the humans and the blame going to the machine.
[0] https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/batman-v-superman-cul...
Even on ticket numbers for the big movies, everything is in decline. For instance Avengers Endgame is, by far, the biggest movie in recent decades. Yet it sold 3 million tickets fewer than e.g. Titanic. This is made even more remarkable by population growth. The population since 1998 (when Titanic was released) has increased by nearly 28%. Even the US population has increased by more than 19% since then. Titanic sold 94,524,324 tickets. A population normalized comparable success would move more than 112 million tickets, and that's using just a 19% growth factor.
Avengers: Endgame, the mega-hit of the 21st century, sold 91,353,296 tickets. The industry is dying and blaming absolutely everything except their own decisions which, in turn, is likely contributing to their own demise as they refuse to accept responsibility for their own declining results. One of the countless parallels shared between Hollywood and the big budget game industry.
I don't really watch movies myself, but I could tell you that Black Panther was a massive cultural success. As was Get Out. And The Shape Of Water (which I did see and enjoyed thoroughly, especially for its seamless integration with the battling of traditional and nontraditional masculinity). But I couldn't tell you anything about, I don't know, Antman or Daredevil other than that they existed at some point. And I think this reflects in commecial successes, also.
What has been forgotten is that masses do want some novelty, even if it isn't by very much. Incremental novelies, perhaps.
One of the biggest-grossing franchises in film history is rewarmed 30s SF pulp with a bigger effects budget.
>more awful movies while trying to argue that 'this is what people want.'
Moviegoers don't want the same old thing. But they also don't want this weird Lynch/Cronenberg (snobbish Godard) stuff. We should have books and films with enough cultural cachet that almost everyone should be experiencing them simultaneously (ie, there's too much fragmentation). But there should be small, independent, unique voices.
So when it comes right down to it, what we really want is something comfortable (known) that doesn't quite feel that way (but not too much) and everyone shares as a cultural touchstone, but one which is unique and special to each individual. This seems to be the real problem we're running against.
They are like 'Chucky Cheeze'.
No thanks.
How about nice, quaint theatre? Maybe a coffee shop out front. Popcorn, soda, candy, beer/wine in respectable containers.
And somewhat reduced price on the entry.
$25/head is just not worth the outing.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?groups=top_250&sort=user_...
There are very few good movies coming out anymore. When is the next Pulp Fiction or The Godfather going to come out? It is very hard to get excited for whatever is being released these days. It's just not even comparable/close.
I'm not sure what genres you like but I cannot imagine you haven't enjoyed a significant number of movies over the past two decades.