The Day the Movies Died (or, why Hollywood can't make good films anymore)

Yet even so good films are still being made. The Social Network, True Grit (a remake even!), Toy Story 3 (a sequel!), The Fighter, Black Swan, How to Train Your Dragon, and Inception were all great films from 2010 (I haven't seen The King's Speech or 127 Hours yet but I hear those were good too). If this is what the system pumps out while it's horribly broken, I'm ok with more of the same.

There's always going to be a ready supply of churned out pap in any medium. Just go to a bookstore and look at all the crap that they keep pumping out. But that doesn't necessarily stop truly excellent works being published as well. Some of my most loved books have been published in the last several years. And with the internet it's easier than ever to sift through the dross to find the gems.

Was he talking about Hollywood or Silicon Valley? Hard to tell anymore.

I read a lot when I was younger, but for some reason kind of stopped for a while. Now I read quite often again, and I love it. eBooks make it easy too. Click, boom, done, and if the author publishes directly or has a decent contract they get 50-70% of my purchase price.

There is a ton of very good literature out there: smart dramas, mysteries, sci-fi, quirky stuff like Gaiman's American Gods, classics I've never bothered to read, etc. The field is a lot larger, due in part to the fact that the capital requirements are essentially nonexistent. Anyone can write a book.

I'm not holding my breath on Hollywood. If movies have hope, it's from the indy scene doing interesting things on small budgets.

Bad times for Hollywood film? Yup.

Good times for the art of filmmaking? It's never been better.

The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.

I see the same thing happening right now in tech. I see a lot of fairly vapid, not very innovative ideas being driven by a lot of marketing and salesmanship.

Top Gun : Movies

Twitter : Tech

When you put marketers in charge of everything, you get a culture of pandering and recycled old ideas. That's what we have.

The problem is, we tend to only remember the handful of great movies made back when. Nobody recalls the acres of dreck.

The other issue that Hollywood can't recognize a hit in the making was always true. Nobody ever thought Casablanca would be anything other than a throwaway time filler. Star Wars was a completely unanticipated hit, even by the people who made it. Etc.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invent...

It's not a complete picture; why doesn't the independent/boutique side fire back up? I think a better explanation is technology/distribution, i.e. HDTV + cable/internet. TV's mentioned in the article, but only as kind of a silver-lining; really it seems more like a classic disruptive technology. Shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad are highly visual and would until recently have been better as movies; now plenty of people have nice TVs, and they work fine there.

So the movie theater's niche is now reduced to material which needs to be huge in size, enormously loud, 3D, or seen primarily by people who refuse to or can't buy HDTVs. Everything else seems transitional.

* Studios: Economic -- low risk, popular, high profit * Writer, reviewers: Aesthetic -- plot, visuals, acting

The mass-market movie model just doesn't lend itself to making high quality product. It compliments high-marketability products - known franchises, sequels, etc.

In movies, you do a big marketing campaign where you spend tens of millions of dollars before opening day, then hope the movie makes that back in its first two weeks.

In television, with multi-week runs, you can hope to build audience, get good buzz, etc with a quality product that you didn't market a ton. See: The Wire, Mad Men, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc. The niche audience seeking quality will find the product.

This is why we are seeing movies move towards huge, low-risk, low-intellect tentpole movies targeted at non-discerning teenagers, and increasing success of relatively intellectual, high quality, long-form television series that create massively loyal followings, lots of rewatching and good DVD sales for years.

(And I'd argue it's a reversal of the 60s-70s, when you saw great, groundbreaking movies like Bonnie & Clyde while most of the TV stuff on networks was middle-of-the-road dreck.)

I'm fine with this situation. If creative people make TV and movies for adults and they do it on HBO or AMC, that's fine. The cable channels have changed the rules the game - you can be creative without Hollywood.

These days, I think the theatre experience is negative for most of us. We'd rather be at home watching on our flatscreens anyway.

It's similar to what Conan did by moving to TBS. It shows that the existing power structure, (network TV) can be circumvented using other means. The web makes it possible for word of mouth to travel quickly, I can watch Conan online for free, he gets ad revenue just like he did before and everyone's happy except an irrelevant NBC.

So, here's my stupid suggestion: make prestigious straight-to-DVD dramas, work out a deal with distributors to charge a little more (to separate out your movies from the garbage straight-to-DVD releases), and effectively do an end-run around the theatre system, which you'll never beat in a world with DVDs & home theatres anyway. This also may take the stigma off releasing NC-17 movies, if they're marketed right.

* Please add "& blu-ray" everytime you see "DVD"

In reality, marketing-driven movie are nothing new. In the 1960s, they were called "exploitation" films; "exploitation" was the 1960s movie-biz term for "marketing". The crucial question is, why is so much of the movie business organized around exploitation films today? And an unsupported psychological hypothesis doesn't cut it as an answer.

Here's an idea that seems at least as good as the answer proffered by the article. The internet makes word-of-mouth travel a lot faster now. It used to be that the box-office receipts of a stinker movie would decline over the first few weeks after its release. Now, they decline even during the opening weekend. (I haven't verified that, but it seems like it ought to be easily verifiable.) People tweet about how bad the movie is even before they've finished watching it.

In turn, this word-of-mouth heightens the winner-take-all nature of the film industry; hit movies take home a bigger share of the total box-office receipts of the industry (unverified, but should be verifiable), with the result that more movies these days fail to even make back their production costs (unverified, but should be verifiable). In short, film production is a riskier investment than it used to be, and there's less that marketing money can do to rescue a stinker.

An economically rational response to this situation (assuming I'm correct!) would be to work harder to figure out which films are going to be hits and which are going to be flops, make the hits bigger hits, and spend less on the flops. For example, you could do any of the following:

• Value talent more highly. Talent can't stop a flop from being a flop, but it can make the difference between a hit and a mega-blockbuster.

• Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.

• Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing. (In a way, that's what's happening with the sequel craze that the article is complaining about, but the difference is that you need to have the story arc planned out: Dune or Star Wars Episode IV or Babylon 5, not Fast Five.)

• Instead of a first episode, release an abridged version, maybe a half-hour. This has been done unintentionally and on a small scale for many years; think of Blade Runner and Blade Runner: the director's cut. The difference is that you can actually save money by not shooting the parts of the story that you leave out. Maybe instead of showing it in theaters, you can show it on Lifetime or HBO or something, or just on your web site.

• Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book. Comics have a lot in common with films: they're intensely visual and powerfully immersive, they even use cinematographic techniques, and a "graphic novel" is a lot closer in length to a movie than it is to War and Peace. These days, online, maybe you could even add a voiceover to your comic book. (Admittedly, filmstrips never really took off as a dramatic medium.) Again, in a sense, studios are doing this already; they're just not funding the production of the comics in the first place. They ought to. If there were ten times as many graphic novels coming out every year, they'd have a much better selection of audience-proven storyboards.

• Post trailers and teaser episodes on BitTorrent before you're done filming in order to see if they take off. It's no guarantee — lots of people will be willing to watch the movie for free even if they wouldn't shell out for a ticket — but if it flops there, it'll probably flop in the theater too.

• Cancel more films before they're even finished shooting. If your early indications are that it's not going to work out, don't try to rescue your investment by sending good money after bad, hiring a famous film editor to try to salvage something from the wreckage, nonsense like that. You need some kind of interim feedback on quality, of course, which is impossible to do reliably, although some of the approaches above might help. The big returns are going to go to the mega-hit films. Invest the money you would have invested in finishing the film in something that has a chance to be a mega-hit instead.

• Leave room in filming budgets for expansion. If early feedback (from the first episode, or just during screenings) is that the film is good, double the special-effects budget. Splurge on ADR and better music.

• Make more films, which means making a lot of low-budget films.

• Diversify your film investments; we should see more multi-studio films, just like we see lots of multi-VC-firm startups.

• Share the risk with the fans. Sell nonrefundable opening-night tickets before you're finished shooting, in order to raise money for the film. Give them cash back if the movie is a hit. Or sell the advance tickets in groups of four. (If the movie's worth watching, they can treat three of their friends for free.)

However, although as I said above, the studios are using some of these approaches, we're mostly seeing something else entirely. When you're used to a certain level of risk, and that level of risk goes up, your natural inclination is not to figure out how to take advantage of the new risk; it's to try desperately to push the risk back down. So, instead, we're seeing stupid moves like these:

• Release the film initially in more theaters, not less. That way, if it sucks, you might still make your money back before everyone sees their friends tweet about how it was so bad they walked out of the theater.

• Make films that people will want to see before they hear from anyone who's actually seen them: sequels, comic strips, toy brands. This is a necessary complement to releasing the film in a lot of theaters at once.

• Spend more on pre-release marketing instead of less. This slashes your maximum possible return on investment, but you have to do it if you're going to get people into all those theaters on opening weekend instead of a week later.

(The author's grudge against comic books is pretty embarrassing. Are you going to tell me Watchmen was infantilizing, not aimed at adults?)

Now, I admit I know little about business and nothing about the business of movies. So maybe these ideas are stupid.

From LA Times, Warner gambles on an unproven commodity. Quoting the first line:

"The studio and its partner have invested $160 million in 'Inception,' a film that is not a sequel, adapted from a comic book or inspired by a toy. They're hoping it follows the path of 'Matrix.'"

I have a couple of points to make.

1) Inception is a great idea .i.e. similar to Matrix, for which the entire world fell at its feet.

2) But unlike Matrix, it's difficult to make a series out of Inception.

3) And last, Inception production cost was $160 million and Warner Bros spend the equivalent amount in marketing ($100+)

So, even good films, those which are born out of new ideas, needs a good marketing plan. The only thing is that the studios should believe in the film!!

The Shutter Island.

It was a wonderful psych-thriller by master Scorcese, had some power packed performance by Leo, but didn't make it to any movie awards. Any takes?