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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see how this effects a culture/mindset shift among large movie producers and directors. Putting aside their artistic concerns that their films are best experienced on the massive widescreen, having a big box office haul seems to be a key part of Hollywood braqfests.

If simultaneous theater+streaming becomes the norm, it would seem the days of multi-hundred-million box office gross will be past. In 2020, the highest grossing film (domestically) so far is the Bad Boys sequel, which released in January and got $204M. The only other 2020 release to break $100M is the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. And many of 2020's top grossing movies were released in late 2019, e.g. "1917" and Star Wars. Even worse, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" – released in September by Warner Bros – basically bombed at under $60M [0].

Given the huge movies that WB is planning to put on HBO (Matrix 4, Wonder Woman, Dune), I wonder if that'll spur Disney to throw Black Widow onto streaming. Apparently its Mulan release (which required a premium subscription) didn't do so well, but seems risky for Disney to sit on its hands while WB goes all in.

[0] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=calen...

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I'm interested in how this impacts the actual movies. I expect them to get much longer. I also expect this will free directors to cover topics and material that might not be appropriate for theatres. What people are willing to watch when in public is different than what people may be willing to watch in their own homes. I expect that Disney will have to run parallel focus groups, possible resulting in slightly different versioning between the streaming and in-theatre content.

Dune is a good example. Dune has for decades been viewed as the quintessential impossible story to ever put on screen. It was done best as a miniseries, and even then it wasn't complete. But an open-ended streaming option not subject to theatre/TV time or content constraints? There is potential for very interesting content.

What you're talking about is already happening, but we still call them "tv shows." A great recent example is The Queen's Gambit. It's adapted from a novel, which "normally" would become a movie. But instead it became a 7 episode miniseries, which allowed for much more character development than a 2-hour movie. Game of Thrones is the obvious example of something that also could have instead been several movies.

I think what we're discovering is that movies, as a medium, are for narratives that can be told in under 3 hours. If your narrative requires longer, or you just want to be able to have more time to develop characters or worlds, it's better to create a show.

I guess it's another form of the medium is the message.

Another effect we seem to be seeing is that streaming seems less inclined to grind out endless seasons of a show until even most of its fans just can't bring themselves to watch any longer. I expect the economics of streaming favor freshness rather than milking a cash cow through a decline when it's got little chance of bringing in fresh viewers.

(Which I think is mostly a good thing while recognizing there have been good series that took a season or more to really find their rhythm and voice.)

> Another effect we seem to be seeing is that streaming seems less inclined to grind out endless seasons of a show until even most of its fans just can't bring themselves to watch any longer. I expect the economics of streaming favor freshness rather than milking a cash cow through a decline when it's got little chance of bringing in fresh viewers.

it's an interesting reversal of the trend. back in the '00s, it seemed like even the best tv shows had a pretty scrappy first season: obviously low budget, little chemistry in the talent. if a show managed to get enough viewers in the first season, it would get a larger budget and hit its stride in the second one. nowadays it seems to be the opposite; most shows seem to give it all they have in a strong first season, then start phoning it in for the next couple, then getting culled without remorse when the viewership drops. I'm curious whether there's an economic reason for this, or if it's all in my head.

I don't claim this is a complete answer but contrast broadcast and streaming.

BROADCAST: Pay for pilots. Pick up some of them. You know a good chunk of shows won't make it past S1. Some won't make it that far. But, especially pre-reality show, you still have a schedule to fill with scripted TV. So you throw a bunch of mostly economical stuff at the wall and see what sticks. The stuff that does, you pick up and groom it.

STREAMING: Same deal with pilots. But now your main objective is to find that hit which will net you a bunch of new subscribers. Yeah, you need filler too but that's not as big a deal. So you're probably incentivized to do more swinging at the fences. And you probably don't care about having as many slow burn series because it's all about how many new subscribers you can sign on and, especially with serialized TV (which streaming/internet has also helped enable), if you don't grab people up-front, it's probably a waste.

I'm generally a fan of miniseries, but I wonder what pressure the producers are putting on creators to lengthen them. I loved the Chernobyl miniseries for example, but I also think it was maybe 1-2 episodes longer than it needed to be. The first and last couple were amazing, but it kind of lagged in the middle.

I'm reading Dune now (no spoilers please!) and I'm really surprised they're making a movie rather than a miniseries.

The upcoming movie only covers the first half of Dune; they're hoping to make a second movie but AFAIK it's not locked in yet.

Publicity seems to be keeping rather quiet about this, for obvious reasons.

Watch the first movie, the one with Sting and Patrick Stewart. Don't worry about spoilers. The book and that movie are not close relations.

Planning to watch it as soon as I finish the book.

Prepare to be angry. It was beautiful; no doubt about that. However, it did a horrible job translating the source material to the big screen.

Translating the source? I figured they just gave everyone their costumes, turned on the camera, and filmed whatever happened randomly.

That would have been a better movie…

I loathe the new format where there’s an extra hour or two of fluff to pad Netflix’s statistics about how much content they have. Although I guess it existed with old style TV too to enable them to sell more ad time.

There’s character development, and then gratuitous time wastage. At least we can skip past it nowadays, or just opt out of watching it.

Pendulums swing from one extreme to the other, as always.

"fluff" padding is much worse than "can we get an extra season or three out of this show", IMO.

[ EDIT: d'oh, I meant to write this in reverse, as "fluff padding is much less bad than .... oh well. ]

I prefer stories to be told that already have a beginning, middle and end at their outset, not just some fingers-crossed "we might get 5 seasons, we can decide how it unfolds once we get to season 3" stuff that has dominated way too much TV.

Granted, the purely episodic shows (e.g. Star Trek, LA Law and the like) are immune to this, mostly.

But give me more True Detective, where the story ending is known before they even start filming, and the only question is "do we get to try another story?"

>"fluff" padding is much worse than "can we get an extra season or three out of this show", IMO.

You're kind of close. They would fluff the seasons to get the episode count to 100 as soon as possible. 100 episodes was the magic number to qualifying for syndication. Syndication is where the money used to be made on content. Ask Jerry Seinfeild or the cast from Friends. Syndication is no longer the holy grail. You are making your content for the syndication platforms from the beginning now. This has allowed for the freedom to use enough episodes to tell your story correctly, and then getting out of the way. No more bottle episodes.

I think you're discounting the in-season requirements that the networks had. They would usually require on the order of 23 episodes for a season, and sell advertiser time during those episodes months in advance. Hence the prevalence of "clip shows": we promised the network x episodes, we only really have been able to make x-1 full episodes, so let's create an episode that is mostly clips from other episodes.

I'm not discounting anything. Everything adds up to a shitty experience for the viewer because people upstream are greedy.

I meant that you stated the syndication threshold as the sole reason for filler, and as I tried to explain, there were other thresholds at play.

Definitely, I like to know the writers have the whole story mapped out prior to even starting the show before investing time into it.

I got burned once by Lost when I was much younger, and hope to not make that mistake again.

Lost was a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the traditional network-tv system. And it’s a shame, because some of the storytelling was remarkable.

I never understood why people stuck with Lost. I stopped watching about 3 episodes into season 3 when it became obvious that the writers where just making shit up with no attempt at an explanation. Season 2 was really good, added a lot of mystery and it started to feel like something was happening, then season 3 went off a whole other tangent. At that point I turned to my wife and said “they’re dead, this is all just made up from one season to another. You can watch it without me in the future.” And guess what, 7 series later it’s revealed that they were all dead. No shit.

I might not have been the target audience though. People often go nuts for JJ Abrams and I’ve honestly hated almost everything of his I’ve watched. So I’m likely just not the kind of person he is targeting.

I think I stopped midway through Season 2 when they started going off on weird tangents and it became obvious this was going to be stretched out to make more money.

But maybe it was because I was young, and the format was new to me, but the first season did capture my interest.

"Stomp on the Mystery Box" is a good post going into the design of these shows, and why they are such traps for audiences.

https://qntm.org/mystery

Lost I can forgive. Magic Island answers a lot of questions.

Battlestar Galactica on the other hand? Cylons had a plan my ass.

Growing up as a kid, the original Battlestar was just this cool sci-fi series with robots. I didn't know about all of its religious overtones. The rebooted version was dripping in it, and got tiresome.

I miss episodic TV shows.

The fly episode of breaking bad comes to mind.

You can think of these streaming tv shows as the Movie medium finally being liberated from having to fit between bathroom breaks.

>> 7 episode miniseries

That is still a holdover from television: predictable equally-time episodes. Why should each episode be of identical length? Why not free the production to tell each episode in a different time. An even more free form would be, for example, 16-hour non-episodic movie where the viewer is left to decide when to take breaks.

Well, as a watcher from series is much better to already know how long an episode already take, which is usually around one hour.

And if you release something all together in 16 hours it became harder to go back to where you stopped, in case the software glitches, harder to comment with friends, which maybe would create less hype, and maybe even create a mental barrier, like, "omg, this is 16 hours long in one go!"

And how are you even supposed to know when you should take a break while watching it for the first time?

Despite the freedom not to, many authors still break down their novels into roughly equal length chapters.

I’ve wanted this approach for the Harry Potter Series. Trying to do it in theatrical film was a mistake I think.

I prefer miniseries. Netflix had the extended version of "The Hateful Eight" broken into a four episode miniseries.

I loved it! Now that I can only watch adult movies after the kids go to bed, I had to watch the original "The Hateful Eight" over two nights.

The miniseries was much easier to watch, and didn't require compromises for running length.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/27/quentin-taranti...

> Now that I can only watch adult movies after the kids go to bed

Just invite them in telling them that it's educational, and they will run away and not go near your TV room.

I don't know if Dune would be the best example. Have the producers said that they plan on using the year delay to continue making real changes to the movie? My impression was that Dune was essentially ready to go this year, and doing a re-edit to take advantage of TV's lack of time constraint isn't necessarily ideal or feasible. I agree that Dune as a book has enough content for a TV miniseries. But if they barely finished shooting before covid shut things down, it's not as if they can in early 2021 attempt expand the scope of the story they hoped to tell.

I would argue the "Snyder cut" of Justice League might be a better example, but that's also an extremely weird and bespoke situation. That is actually being released as a 4-episode mini-series. Even though HBO has budgeted $70M for additional shooting and production, presumably most of the cut will use what Snyder shot back in 2017. I'm unclear how much he shot back then was then cut when Joss Whedon took over. Snyder being who he is probably had wanted to do a 3+ hour movie for the original release, and may have actually shot most of those scenes.

Disney already announced that Pixar's Soul will release to Disney+ the same week as WW1984 and will not be a "premium" release like Mulan. That does seem to indicate that Disney is feeling the same pressure, though I believe they still haven't announced plans for any of the Marvel properties yet.

> Even worse, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" – released in September by Warner Bros – basically bombed at under $60M

This is so sad, it's such an incredible movie! Were it not for covid it surely would have been the blockbuster of the year in typical Nolan fashion.

From what I heard from people who saw it in theaters, the sound mixing was terrible so you could only understand half the dialogue, and it was overall very confusing. It was basically made for multiple viewings.

I would like to confirm, it was just truly awful mixing — the only way the theater was able to get you to vaguely hear the dialog was to have volume loud enough the music physically hurt to listen to; the difference between the preceding trailers and the movie itself was so clear I can only assume someone important got hit in the head sometime during development.

International friends have mentioned it wasn’t an issue, because they had subtitles and could keep the film at reasonable volume, and they overall enjoyed the movie.

Maybe it was intentionally designed to eliminate the English speaking audience. But multiple viewings won’t help you.

I do wonder if I got some sort of hearing damage from seeing it in person. It was incredibly loud. I’ve been to many loud movies and several obnoxiously loud concerts, and Tenet was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Frankly, it was an irresponsible choice by its creators. If it physically hurts, viewers can’t engage with the movie at all. They’re distracted by pain. I can’t even call it an artistic choice because it goes so far beyond that. I would never see it in a theatre again, even without COVID.

I can’t wait to watch it at home so that I can properly digest and enjoy the movie.

I don't understand how this happens, and it's not just a Nolan issue. It's like the movie in its entirety has never been watched by the creators before it being released.

From my understanding, this is a Nolan problem. The Dark Knight rises had similar issues with sound mixing, especially with Bane's voice in certain scenes. I remember Interstellar having issues as well. Funny enough, Googling his last few movies (ex: "Dunkirk sound mixing problems") all lead to articles around the time of the movie's release and the audience complaining about sound problems.

Slightly off topic, but I personally use subtitles for everything I watch now because I got tired of missing dialogue for different reasons. More movies being on demand is a blessing for me in this regard.

I moved to subtitles on always years ago for that reason! Poor mixing and it made it harder to multitask. Sometimes I have to look at my phone watching TV or something and I might not totally comprehend a line, but then I can quickly glance up and read it. At this point it's subconscious. This also enables me to enjoy foreign films and shows a lot more, since I'm so used to reading subtitles already. I watched "To the Lake" on Netflix a few weeks ago and enjoyed it more than I thought I would after seeing it was all in Russian. That experience opened me up to watching more foreign live-action TV and I'm getting back into anime again. Come to think of it, I've watched subs anime for most of my life. There are only a few series that I think the English VAs are better than the original Japanese ones.

The only genre I do not turn subtitles on for, is stand-up comedy, for obvious reasons.

The audio mix for Interstellar was awful when I saw it in at the cinema too. I spoke to the manager, thinking it was a problem with the sound setup at that venue, and he said it was being widely reported around the world.

Devil's advocate, much of the first (and second...) times you watch the movie, your main job is to figure out the forward/backward time stuff. The sound mixing makes it less clear that the backwards speech is backwards. This a) sucks, but b) makes it more rewarding when you eventually figure it out.

But overall, I'd rather Christopher Nolan sit in a normal theater and listen to it before he signs off on the final sound product.

The sound mixing was very deliberate artistic expression that is somewhat controversial. See https://www.indiewire.com/2020/11/christopher-nolan-director...

This is all Nolan movies. You've got to go in expecting not to be able to understand what they're saying.

Saw it in theatre a few days ago, and agree that the sound mixing was bad, making the dialogue difficult to follow. Didn't he learn anything from Interstellar in regards to this?

Excellent movie otherwise, and I look forward to watching it again with subtitles. (Although it's possible I already have.)

Even better, this is a problem that is nearly 100% solved by watching with subtitles (esp at home). I mean, it may sound bad but at least you can understand it by reading.

People praise Solaris all the time. I've tried several times to watch it, but it's just unbearably dull.

The original is a crappy attempt at outdoing 2001. The remake isn't bad and Viola Davis's performance is worth seeing along with the twist added to the story.

Sorry, I meant the original.

Tenet was incredible. It’s one of the few movies lately that I spent a lot of time reading about and watching breakdowns and explanations after the movie.

Eh it may have been good but from the trailers my thinking was, “oh look another condescending Chris Nolan movie,” which is a shame since I loved his stuff up to inception.

Interstellar was condescending!?

"Interstellar" was an excellent film, physicists who haven't learned to suspend disbelief may have trouble enjoying it.

A friend of mine who is a physicist said he literally got up halfway through the movie, yelled "Fuck this" and walked out.

EDIT: Another physicist friend sat through it, but he said in his defense he was drunk and fell asleep.

I don't work as a physicist (but I got my degree in Engineering Physics @ CU-Boulder, 2009) and I went to see Interstellar in IMAX on opening night. I really enjoyed it overall, and the scenes involving the realistically-rendered black hole were worth it alone.

I'm relatively easy to please when it comes to movies, but to each their own of course.

I'd probably be more inclined to use a word like pretentious. I actually liked Inception quite a bit but didn't much care for Interstellar.

That’s the word I was looking for

Ah damn I thought that was before Inception. Although, yeah, it kinda was.

Opinions vary. We walked out of the cinema when cars starting traveling in reverse. Simply unwatchable, utter crap. For reference, I liked Interstellar very much.

I'm almost sure it would have bombed in any year, in fact, because everyone is postponing releases and freezing production until Covid-19 passes, it probably got an even higher box office than what it would have got in a competitive environment.

Yeah, every single person I know who started to watch it, gave up in the first 30 minutes - excepting me. I mean the final movie twist was obvious and my wife called it before getting up from the living room and leaving to browse her phone in bed.

The editing was rough and it wasn't fully explained what was happening. What other team members, that weren't the team members betraying him and not the guy in the chair "who lasted 18 seconds"? What?

I didn't like it that much 6/10 from multiple perspectives.

Mulan had a lot worse things going for it than your average blockbuster though.

Mulan being the first live-action Disney to not have songs, and axing Mushu, were controversial decisions at least amongst US audiences from the get-go. On top of that there was cultural controversy as well, with the actress supporting the HK police and the film credits thanking the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.

As much as I cannot believe I am saying this, Kimetsu no Yaiba got $280 mil at the Japanese box office.

It is absolutely impossible to overstate the success of Kimetsu no Yaiba. In October its 22 volumes were the top 22 selling manga in Japan. It was more than a quarter of the entire manga industry this year.

https://twitter.com/Josu_ke/status/1333457420547452930

And yeah, despite being released only in a single medium-sized country only in the local language, it is the 6th highest grossing film of the year.

I think it is important to note how well the animated series set this up and how they adapted an actual story, not an utterly unrelated side story (like the norm for properties like Dragonball). Considering the quality of TV in general, this might be a model that will be adopted.

Oh, and unlike the vast majority of Anime serieses produced today, Kimetsu no Yaiba somehow manages to appeal to the mainstream.

(This article, while old, really hit the nail on the head about how the non-mainstream was the only game in town for the longest time; http://neojaponisme.com/2011/11/30/the-great-shift-in-japane...)

-edit- I meant to link to this; http://neojaponisme.com/2011/12/01/the-great-shift-in-japane...

It's not just about bragfests. The box office revenue generated is a key input variable in downstream licensing prices (that is, for premium Pay TV, cable channels, syndication, etc.) So, the bigger the box office, the more the movie generates "automatically" during the rest of its lifecycle. In some cases, you can think of the massive investments in marketing around the time of the theatrical opening as a loss leader for greater lifetime revenue.

I'm pretty skeptical that big budget superhero style movies can make a profit this way. It either means a shift in the types of movies that get made (not a bad thing), or studios eating cost for a couple of years until the theater market rebounds. I can see non-Disney studios losing a lot of money on this model and mergers and acquisitions would not be surprising to me.

That's when you just go animated because they're better off that way anyway. We're probably less than 20 years off from being able to show fully virtual films that are close to being virtually indistinguishable from live action anyway.

When you see one of those "behind the scenes" comparisons of a modern superhero movie with what's shot "live" and what's composited in later, you realize how much of it really is a fancy "cartoon". So much of what you see is animated in some fashion that the main difference between that and something billed as "animation" is the art style and toolset.

Some quick googling and it appears that animated is roughly 25% cheaper, is that enough to make the direct route profitable?

> Apparently its Mulan release (which required a premium subscription) didn't do so well, but seems risky for Disney to sit on its hands while WB goes all in.

Part of that might have been that the Mulan movie just wasn't good and didn't look that good even from the jump in the trailers. Word got out pretty fast before the release about it having no songs, no Mushu, etc which was so much of the charm of the original.

I think Marvel and Disney would be very disappointed if this trend continues across the board. At least if we go by Marvel’s last decade results.

With the debt that Disney has, I think that's an understatement.

> their films are best experienced on the massive widescreen

Now that giant 70" TVs are cheap, the difference between home and theater is less and less.

I still love the theater, and drive-ins, and am looking forward to being able to go see a movie with my kids once we get our vaccines!

It's still so vastly different. In a movie theater you are forced to not play with your phone, etc while watching. Even though you are just sitting you are getting "out" of normal life for a while. You get better immersion and there is a shared experience that you simply can't get at home. I fear that movie theatres are soon going to be a "luxury" as small theaters are killed and they try to turn them all into the "dinner and a movie" thing for higher margins, which to me completely defeats the entire purpose. There is something awesome about walking out of a great movie, the lighting outside is so different than when you came in and it's a great surreal experience in and of itself.

Early in the pandemic I realized that movie theaters were gonna be a no go, so I purchased a 100" drop down screen, 4k ust laser projector and a surround sound system. I even replaced the couch. It's been a great investment for us during these times. I'm sure I will occasionally go to the theater, but it will not nearly be as often as before.

If I could get a fanless 4K projector, I think I'd go for that nowadays. My walls are already white, and the concept of "hiding" my TV is increasingly appealing.

I'd imagine if you were going to invest in a 4K projector you'd still want a drop down screen unless your walls are perfectly flat white and non-textured.

Definitely agree it would be nice to have a hidden TV though :)

Or just have a huge TV that's flat enough to act as art. I think most TV manufacturers include some sort of "art" mode where it just shows a photo or slideshow. Heck, all of the streaming boxes do it.

I don't know of any eInk displays that could function as TVs, and a TV in "art mode" will end up putting out a lot of backlight, which is basically the opposite of what you'd want when you're trying to hide your TV.

You really need a screen for a projector, even the flattest white walls have some kind of texture that is prominent enough to degrade the image. Luckily screens can be had for quite cheap, at least in comparison to the cost of the projector itself.

But also, if you want high-quality surround sound, then the center speaker needs to be at ear height in front of you. The way home cinema owners arrange that is by putting the speaker behind a screen that has tiny perforations to let the sound through.

What was your UST projector of choice? I have one of the LG ones, and in my experience, the focus isn't sharp across the whole image.

I'm using the vava.

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