Matt Damon quickly explains why they don’t make movies like they used to
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There's just a different level of acting in the original Total Recall. Arnie, Ronny Cox, the growling Michael Ironside, Sharon Stone. The other supporting actors bought something to the table. With the remake? Nothing! Colin Farrell was boring, and his wife was leagues behind what Stone portrayed.
Maybe the problem is with the film certificate. RoboCop was a 12A, so I guess the executives thought "to hell with the writing, writing is hard."
Hollywood occasionally gets it right, I guess. Joker (2019) was pretty good, despite being a 15. I thought it was a very cohesive film in the way they chose characters like the dwarf, why Fleck committed the murders he did, and how the whole thing developed. You could tell there was a whole lot more thought put into the script.
DVD's and Blue Ray have plummeted, but streaming is up. Over all home market is up.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/the-death-of-the-dvd-why-sal...
I would have thought Behind the Candelabra would do better in a streaming market. Compared to buying super hero movies.
Behind the Candelabra had no cinema release in the US, it was released straight to HBO.
Back when VHS and DVD's were the thing, you'd pretty much get a very finite amount of choices, and usually went with one of those. Of course, you had the huge rental stores with thousands of flicks, but in most places, the selection was just a small fraction of that.
20 years ago, we'd go to the rental store/kiosk/whatever, set on seeing a movie. So we picked one, of the maybe 30 titles. Could be good, could be bad, who knows.
Today, I spend probably 20 minutes browsing 5 different streaming services before I find anything. And I've probably browed through hundreds of titles in that amount of time.
I'm not sure how much the studios get for letting streaming services show their movies either, compared to the rental stores back in the day, or flat out selling DVDs to consumers.
Streaming has even less choices. The Netflix catalog for example is laughable, and they push even more for their own stuff.
Sad to say, but (semi-legal) services like popcorn time etc. were almost the pinnacle of online streaming. These days, I still have to fly the black flag, from time to time, if I want to find certain titles to watch on the go.
And then months later there it was available for everyone to see at their homes (with yet another advertising push).
Like he said, the DVD release was like another theatrical release. You could own the film, or rent it and watch it twice if you'd like to - this may sound odd, but it was almost like a ritual. At least for me, renting a movie on Fridays was a whole process.
But it wasn't a chore, it was quite enjoyable. Sometimes frustrating because you were waiting for films for months before they were available... imagine as a kid wanting to watch some Diney or Pixar movie, it could be quite painfull after watching months of advertising for the movie, for toys and merchandising, for McDonalds Happy Meals toys, etc.
Things had a different cadence, a different rhythm, and probably things were appreciated differently.
Mind you I'm not saying "oh those were the days!", I'm saying it was different and apparently it was more profitable for movie makers.
But for me sometimes browsing movies to watch on apps can become quite boring, there's something about the "i want this now, a lot of it, and fast" that I can't quite put my finger on it. Probably delayed gratification plays a role on this.
With that said, the majority of people won't forget it, especially with the media budgets used for advertising - promos, appearances, going on the talk shows tours, PR to news/magazines/, etc that's all coming out of the promotion budget. You probably don't realize it but you get in contact with movie promotional material several times before it launches.
Maybe you like just a particular set of movies, so the majority leave you little impression. I have movies that are completely oblivious to me, others that stick and leave me curious, but probably with so much content, noise and distraction it's normal to don't recall it all.
In my youth I recall that The Matrix, LOTR, Kill Bill, Harry Potter, all left me with big anticipation to watch them, for months if not years.
But I too disagree with those premises.
Matt daemon is saying there isn’t room for the ~25 million dollar movie, because cinema ticket sale now has to carry the entire revenue stream.
But I’ve seen mostly smaller movies in cinema for the past two years.
Hell, parasite, which won best picture was a $15 million production, so obviously there is room for “small” movies
But past the cheap gamble phase, studios start doubling down and throw in big name actors, and start advertising the crap out of it, hoping to get people to watch it. There's no $25 million movies, because they end up $50 million movies.
Well, evolved incredibly because of the technology mostly amounts two "3 out of 4 movies are superheroes in spandex for adult-children" who can't handle more depth even in their 30s and 40s...
It's a well-researched and planned strategy to ensure largest possible geographic spread, avoiding anything that would be too problematic for the box office. After all, the studios aren't planning just on local release for financials and considering international as bonus.
Capitalism, ho!...
Yes, but without the men-children to gulp those movies down, those scripts would themselves be "problematic for the box office".
The shallowness is exactly what makes it easy watching for large groups that can fit in whatever gaps they find with local preferences, combined with making it much easier for localised edits to be done.
Whether the movie includes comic book superheroes or not is not relevant - arguably, many a comic geek could probably point to reduction of depth in the plotlines in some of those. Same goes for typical US DoD propaganda pieces ^W^W^W^W Hollywood action movies, Disney reboots, "Butchered Love Actually Remake" CXXVII, and many other big budget plays that use this approach.
It works because while it's not a great meal, it gets you an equivalent of mcdonald burger in foreign country. Not great, not terrible, and the local adaptations probably aren't big enough to stop it from being "safe" choice.
Go check out The Green Knight. It's outstanding, and it's in theaters right now.
Or almost anything else A24 releases. And that's just one studio.
In 2000-2010 I think the attention was more distributed, and in the 60s-90s was all over the place, the New Hollywood of the 60s with things like Easy Rider; Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese and Spielberg in the 70-80s, and the edginess of Tarantino in the 90s.
And of course, much more weird and experimental movies where more mainstream, see David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, John Waters, even europeans/asians directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Scorsese talk about that:
>Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.
>So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.
>That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...
Why does it cost a hundred million?
Is it because actors are paid millions for a few months of work?
Maybe that's the real problem.
Previous to technology the limited number of movie stars and rock stars had a more or less monopoly because the entertainment was funneled through a very few channels.
Now entertainment is democratized and widely available.
Maybe the real reason is that these people aren't willing to work for reasonable wages.
But 25 million seems like a lot for a small film that's mainly script and acting.
Horror movies require a ton of special effects which I imagine is where huge budgets start to come into play.
But many of the best movies I've ever seen don't require tons of special effects.
Taxi driver, good will hunting, the godfather, moonlight, etc.
It's possible if the quality is there.
If you want cheaper actors you can cast cheaper actors. But obviously you won’t get any actor to take minimum wage gig if they have a better offer somewhere else.
This has nothing to do with unwillingness to work for less money. And trying to put the blame for what movies get made on actors who have absolutely no control over that is just silly.