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Comment by seanhandley | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a while with a guy who'd worked at the BBC for many years.

His reasoning for why movies are more boring was simple: money.

A production team is looking to distribute their movie in as many channels as possible, and with the broadest appeal possible. As a result, you see a film made with the broad strokes but lacking in subtlety. If a film might be challenging because of the subject matter, the complexity of the dialogue, the character development, or the plot then it gets dialled back.

You lose the specific cultural references that give a film it's charm and it ends up not really being a true reflection of any people anywhere - just easy Friday night cinema fodder that maximises return on investment.

A movie sucks because it isn't art any more.

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Money has always been there, I think it’s really more about connectedness. Audience sizes have exploded as population has grown and cultures have become more connected due to globalization and the Internet, so the TAM has exploded and led to the watering down of…everything, from movies to games to news & politics.

Too bad then, because if the audience has exploded then so too have the niche audience that would appreciate a film about, say, John von Neumann (ha ha, just to pick someone I just read an article about from HN).

I think this audience is there but they are watching these films on Netflix. I observed this phenomenon from 2019 to today when I got a monthly AMC movie pass that allows me to watch any three movies a week every week. What I observed even pre pandemic is that any film that is not a major established blockbuster (Superhero films, James bond, etc.) has little to no people coming out to see them. I further tried to understand this trend by writing a data collecting tool that leverages AMC's API to better understand who is coming out. It showed me that there are tons of empty screens for many smaller films going on. Finally to help control to see if this is a AMC thing, I also signed up for Cinemark(a competitor) and observed basically the same results.

It sucks because this harms directors I actually want to see succeed like Edgar Wright. Edgar is a big proponent of watching movies on the big screen so he designs his films to be primarily viewed on cinema screens and pushes for the longest release window he can get. Unfortunately, outside the cities, I observed little uptake for his latest film. :/

Oddly enough, money is also why exciting movies are made. Not many people make movies, nor art, out of the generosity of their hearts.

I think I would argue that the "art" is in fact made by people without the expectation of financial gain.

Everything else you're describing is not in fact "art", it's a product.

No kidding.

I'm not saying "money is wrong, make all films for free".

When a production team makes a movie, they take a risk. I think the problem is that the people making the artistic decisions are also the ones trying to minimise risk and maximise revenue.

I appreciate a film needs to be a commercial success to make it worthwhile to the creators, but there comes a point where the artistic integrity has been utterly sacrificed and you get a dull, anemic, forgettable film.

Fair enough. I thought you were going down the "capitalism is bad" route. I think I understand what you mean.

> I think the problem is that the people making the artistic decisions are also the ones trying to minimise risk and maximise revenue.

Knowing absolutely nothing about production, I would surmise there is a financial science and formula applied to films estimating modelling their potential profit. I mean something like "there must be x car chases to draw y amount of viewers" for an action film and so on.

Since such formulas would be based on past data, we rarely see something fresh as it's riskier.

You can have movies make money without having the money drive creative decisions. The bottom line focus of corporate content is the reason american pop culture has turned to shit in the last 20 years and everything is a remake or a rehash.

It isn't money, it's risk management/minimalization by large coorporations because that's their optimal strategy.

Really good movies appeal to different audiences at different levels, if you're looking just for pure action, funny lines, you may find it there, and if you're looking for a deep story, you may find it there as well. So in theory, there needn't be a contradiction between a wide audience and an awesome movie.

Admittedly, these movies are hard to come by, Drive (2011) would be one of them for me, although there must be a more recent one I can't think of now.

> His reasoning for why movies are more boring was simple: money.

If you look back at the best movies throughout history, a lot of them were made outside the Hollywood system. It's easy to think that movies today are worse than Apocalypse Now or Star Wars, while forgetting that those movies also couldn't get made in their day.

I agree. While money has always been there, there hasn't been such intense "statistics" and micromanaging behind every decision. Directors could get away with doing many things out of the respect for the art rather than money. The systematised nature of it, this automated process of using statistics to automate creative decisions, is the worst part, because you can't escape it. In the past we had a base plot that must be interesting and make money, but there were so many avenues for being subversive on top of that. Now, everything is in service of the machine

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