Alternatively, DIY. As streaming became more popular, optical media and hard drives became far more cheap. Over the last 10-15 years I've ended up with more than 500 movies, all of which I own legally and most of which cost me $5 or less. They get to all of my devices through Plex (I used to use Kodi, which is fine over a LAN if that's all you care about).
A significant number of them aren't available for streaming anywhere at the moment, and plenty more would require obscure services I don't feel a need to pay for. It was a gradual upfront cost, but not that extravagent compared to the cost of paying for a couple of streaming services over that time - to say nothing of the 6-10 I'd have to subscribe to to actually have access to all of it.
One can also find very interesting stuff on YouTube, depending on how good your search skills are, I know that at the start of the pandemic I had discovered a user who was uploading Italian western spaghetti movies in HD format. I think I might also have found something similar for Hong Kong wuxia movies from the 1960s and 1970s but I'm not sure.
We regularly ask each other "Where's Roman Holiday but with a cute girl instead of Gregory Peck. Audrey Hepburn can stay."? Why all the drama in movies these days? We just wanna see two girls kiss and walk away in the twilight, hand-in-hand. But all we get is drama like Ammonite.
Why isn't there yet a Poser or Daz3D/Blender/MakeHuman/$GAME_ENGINE that combined makes it easy for people to tell tales as movies yet? It should be possible to put everything together in an interface that even a movie producer could understand, which would make it a doddle for ordinary people.
This is happening right now and it is mostly an update of the film techniques used in schlock, b films, but the results are much better.
Corridor Crew makes a movie in Unreal Engine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K7a_aMGA7Y
Sassy Justice talked to Jared Kushner about Deep Fakes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjmmP1rE_3A
1/3 of the posts on Two Minute Papers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEsYo9L5lOo
I won't be surprised when someone can feed a script into a model and out comes a fully rendered movie.
Okay, seriously? That's a really good idea right there. I personally would lean towards Blender + Godot game engine for such a project, but I'm just hugely in favor of open source in general, so… The thing to make such a tool useful though would be an easily accessible library of actors (character models), animation/movement presets/prefab library, scenery and set dressing, and an interface to tie it all together in a way "which would make it a doddle for ordinary people" as you say. I could see something like that bein' a huge boon for "storyteller" types to get a good start in the media creation arena though.
And of course, that library... That would be a source of _real_ money.
I don’t see how that’s enough to support a film? No challenge to overcome or issue to resolve? That’s a basic of storytelling. What’s left without it?
Amazon does too. They usually have a handful of quality old movies (lots of junk too), but some of their originals are very good.
https://www.finder.com/uk/netflix-around-the-world/genre-lis...