Disney’s troubles show how technology has changed the business of culture | Hacker News Reader

Disney’s troubles show how technology has changed the business of culture

economist.com

34 pointspseudolus68 comments

The fragmentation of media exposure due to technological change is a really interesting phenomenon. I had small taste of what it must’ve been like in the US in the 1950s and 1960s because in Bangladesh we only had one television channel and aside from domestic news and soap operas the main draw was American network shows like Star Trek: TNG. Everyone watched the same thing because there was literally nothing else to watch. Even as a kid in the US in the 1990s, prime time was dominated by the four networks. Even kids knew what “Friends” was about because their parents all watched it. Today I couldn’t even tell you the prime time lineup of any network. The decline in attendance at movie theaters has had a similar effect. You can’t take for granted that everyone has seen the latest Bond movie.

The funny thing is, the companies themselves muddy the water significantly. By buying critic websites, critics and and raising there own numbers for cultural relevance and viewers. But money does not lie, and as soon as the audience has to pay for something, the real viewerbase shows some streaming empires naked.

> The decline in attendance at movie theaters has had a similar effect. You can’t take for granted that everyone has seen the latest Bond movie.

You can count on most everyone seeing the hits, still. The recent Avatar and Top Gun sequels, whatever the latest pump and dump from comic book or Jurrasic Park franchises, for example.

I know a lot more people who never go into franchise movies than those that do and even those are loosing interest in sequel trash

Paramount and Skydance's “Top Gun: Maverick” was the highest-grossing domestic release in 2022[0], generating $719 million in ticket sales.. I think there is more than that on this equation.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/10/top-gun-maverick-disney-top-...

At $10/ticket, that's 72 million people. About 1 out of 5 people if those are the US figures and not worldwide.

And I dunno about you, but at least around here, tickets have been closer to $15-20 for a while.

I haven't seen any movies in theaters since before the start of the pandemic.

I haven't seen any of those. We know that most people haven't seen any particular one of those three, because we (vaguely, with a huge effort) know how many tickets they've sold.

How can you count on that? I haven't seen either of those nor do I know anybody that has. There's too many movies going through to be able to see them all. Maybe for people that are super into them but not everybody is.

Nope, haven't seen anything you listed.

I don't even _know_ anyone who has seen these movies.

I know one, but I'm not sure that reflects our preferences since a lot of people have been, and still are, avoiding movies theaters due to covid.

I think we'll get more people seeing big blockbuster movies once covid and other viruses aren't such a concern.

The median American used to see zero movies a year (in a theatre).

Has to be different now with streaming. But with a million older movies and TV shows to choose from, I'm not sure it isn't still true of pay-per-view movies like those. I for instance rarely pay even $1 for a movie.

Median American? Does this include babies and the elderly? Where did this metric originate?

The bigger question is how many people go to the movie theatre (cinema). In 1930s America, about half of people used to go to the cinema on a weekly basis. By the 1950s it was 30%, by 1950 it bottomed out at 10% [0]

Today it's very rare. This is not because of the relative quality of the films, it's because there's more choice.

While most people who go do the cinema occasionally, nowhere near "Everyone" saw Avatar, Top Gun, Endgame, etc. In the UK there were 13 million cinema admissions last July, which would be just 1 in 5 people even if everyone who went only went once, and they only went to see Top Gun.

Same with watching TV. In the 90s about half a given population would watch primetime tv, today it's nearer 1/10th, there's more options to entertain. .

In the UK cinema dropped like a stone in 1955 [1], when ITV started broadcasting.

[0] https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...

[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6693/business/cinema-atte...

Every single thing you mentioned is based on existing IP, with the youngest one, Avatar, bring already a decade old, and others multiple decades. We are running on fumes.

"Today I couldn’t even tell you the prime time lineup of any network."

This observation really hit home, and I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure what the implication is. But you're totally right with the observation. We've lost some societal glue.

We didn't lose it, so much as we gave it away when we had the opportunity. The choice provided by the Internet -> streaming dissolved that glue as each of us chose what to watch according to our own preference.

I think there is a larger phenomena at play here. We are learning that if every human has complete freedom to choose where they get the information that forms their intellectual environments, our society becomes more fragmented and the people in those societies become more separated from the people physically close to them.

It's almost like humans need some constraints in order to form robust and resilient communities/society. Intuitively this makes sense, as our ancestors which gave us our society had (from our perspective) incredibly uniform intellectual environments.

The same could be said of radio stations to Spotify, Bandcamp and the like. Once upon a time everyone listened to the same radio programs because that's all there was, then records came.. Technology has been splitting us into separate cultures hard for a good long while now. Probably even created the idea of a teenager.

One of my favorite media exposure statistics is that 105 MILLION people watched the series finale of the show MAS*H [0]. In fact, of the top 10 most watched broadcasts in US television history, the other 9 are Super Bowls.

I also feel like we are in the middle stage of the fragmentation. Netflix etc meant that my set of shows might not overlap with your set of shows but some shows are still popular amongst a bunch of people.

The next step, which feels not that far off, is where you tell Netflix AI: "Hey, I want a movie with Charlton Heston, Ariana Grande and Abraham Lincoln set on a space station, go." And it then generates it for you.

With that level of customization and personalized media, I wonder if we will feel even more fragmented culturally as we lose these common narratives and touch points.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio...

> With that level of customization and personalized media, I wonder if we will feel even more fragmented culturally as we lose these common narratives and touch points.

The thing is, people like having these common narratives. They like talking with their friends about ongoing stories, they like telling their friends about new interesting things that they're watching. I don't think any sort of system without that would work. I just don't think it's what people want out of their media.

They got too big for their own good. 7 Marvel movies will be released in the next 19 months. Peak capitalism but I guess there is always a crowd for that. Also I'd assume the whole production is basically so streamlined now they can "just do it". Put out as many movies as possible and the meantime lower production costs, I guess in the future AI will be a big help here too especially in the CGI part.

unfortunately, streamlining these movies made them really bad. There's no soul in these movies that come from the love of the comic book characters. It's like a meat factory, rolling out identical, tasteless meat in a can that's cheap and easy to consume, but lack depth of flavour.

they often purposely hire people who are not fans of the originals whose remake they are making. what those kinds of people makr are always hit and miss, and often miss.

I guess I'll go to bat for the multi-billion dollar megacorp since nobody else is doing it

Avengers: Endgame was great. They did a heist through time that was basically a speed run of all the other movies. Ant-Man preserved the "F You" energy from Hank Pym while keeping things just grounded enough to be fun. Thor: Love and Thunder was basically an action-packed version of a "Flight of the Conchords" episode and they ended up solving their problems by talking instead of just smashing heads in.

So far as big budget movies go, these are the best I've ever seen

I _hate_ time travel in movies unless the movie is only about time travel. It's such a cop-out. Can't figure out how do to it? Just use time travel!

But the rest of your comment I agree with.

love and thunder was terrible. They completely misused Christian Bale, the script barely develops that character.

A lot of shoehorned humor, to try and capture the fun that was thor ragnarok.

Avengers Endgame was just ok. I never saw ant man. Thor Love and Thunder was an affront to film making, and potentially a crime against humanity.

So we can agree to disagree.

Thor love and thunder was just bad. WW1988 is a crime against humanity

Lower production costs also means competitors will have an easier time producing content. Hollywood studios have been the gatekeepers of culture but that's going to be more and more difficult for them to enforce as the limiting factor on movie making becomes more about creating desirable storytelling and less about wealth. These hugely expensive CGIfests seem to be the last ditch attempt at setting a bar that only the incumbent studio can meet. Someone will come along with a compelling story and a meager budget and end up showing up the nth iteration of whatever comicbook character they're pushing at the moment.

>7 Marvel movies will be released in the next 19 months.

Disney-Marvel is now the Taco-Bell of entertainment.

In fact, most modern Hollywood productions are absolute trash. Just poor quality remakes, sequels, spin-offs of once popular franchises where they shoe-horn various modern-day identity politics and woke "progressive" topics trying to appeal to Twitter critic mobs, expecting people are NPCs who should just mindlessly consume whatever their corporate machine craps out of their "creative" board-room meetings.

Top Gun Maverick was for me the only enjoyable movie worth watching in 2022, which is somewhat sad since it was full of plot holes but everyone enjoys thrilling dogfights and it followed a very simple recipe that has been battle proven all the way till the '90s but for some reason Hollywood decided to actively reject it now in most modern productions thinking that some sliver spoon executive detached from reality knows better than the fans who buy the tickets. Tom Cruise seems to be one of the last few in show-biz who knows how to give fans exactly what they want.

These days, I find much better quality stuff is coming out of Korea, Denmark, France, Finland, etc.

>where they shoe-horn various modern-day identity politics and "progressive" topics trying to appeal to Twitter critic mobs

It's refreshung to see this level of objective honesty on HN.

There's an irony in complaining about "progressive" signalling in movies while praising Top Gun: Maverick, a movie so woke that they made the baddies an unidentifiable country just so nobody would get offended.

How was obfuscating the enemy woke? The plot is way too simplistic for that to have made any difference.

Top Gun: Maverick, a movie so woke that they made the baddies an unidentifiable country

Was the original Top Gun also woke? Pretty sure they didn't identify the "baddies" in that one either.

They did that with the original one too, which is why I think it worked.

BTW: it was obviously Iran, except they don't have 5th generation fighters.

>they don't have 5th generation fighters.

Neither does Russia ;)

This is all about the amount of money going into these movies. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake it's much safer to rehash an existing franchise like Top Gun than to give directors and screenwriters the creative freedom they need to come up with interesting new stories. Wokeness is just a symptom of producers putting money where they think ticket-buyers want. If they thought there was more money to be made appealing to MAGA they'd do that instead.

The stuff coming out of Korea, Denmark, France, Finland, etc, is made with much lower budgets. They can afford to take risks.

What I suspect, and we’re starting to see a bit, is that they need to massively cut budgets. Hundred million dollar budgets per movie don’t seem like they make sense. Instead, I think we’ll see more movies made on a shoestring budget. Some good, some bad.

Disney has started to go this direction by building expensive technology they can reuse, like the set of Mandalorian. I just saw a trailer that the set has now been used in a new movie (but I don’t recall which). If you haven’t seen the set, go find it on YouTube. Pretty interesting tech. It’s expensive but will probably reduce budgets long term.

Anyway, I think cheaper productions is the only thing that will work with so many options today. Cheaper movies like The Blair Witch Project are what I expect to see more of.

I, personally, prefer paying for all the independent services I care to watch. I can pay for one or I can pay for 10 and have a cable like bill. But, I get to choose.

I think its harder to do then it seems. There is still a massive race for talent.

The technology product for the the Mandalorian set is called “The Volume”.

Essentially, instead of filming in front of a green screen and digitally adding in the backgrounds post filming, they now have a huge seamless array of video screens behind the actors and a small set which has pre-rendered background scenery video playing and post filming changes to the background are generally not necessary.

The problem with the mandalorian is the writing not the effects of set dressing. I never watched past the first season because the writing was very poor.

The streaming numbers would disagree with you.

Someone above posted a link showing that 29 of the 30 most watched shows ever in the US are Super Bowls. Would you say they have the best writing?

there are a lot of popular things that are not very good.

Each episode felt formulaic in that he would get to solve a particular mundane problem (EG: dealing with local thugs and generally not fate of the galaxy stuff), generally being a "good guy" in the whole process and then a steady amount of overall story arc development.

It seemed to be me it felt like a deliberate style decision by the creators, a throw back to easier going older shows that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.

This may not be for everyone, but I found it very easy going, slightly amusing at times and a refreshing change from the current typical high budget TV series which seem way more serious.

> Disney has started to go this direction by building expensive technology they can reuse, like the set of Mandalorian. I just saw a trailer that the set has now been used in a new movie (but I don’t recall which).

It seems the official name is StageCraft[1]&[3], and they have evolved it since the first Mandalorian-Season[2], having now multiple of those sets around the world. This is pretty cool for production, but probably awful for tourism. No locations anymore which people can visit to support the local economy.

[1] https://www.ilm.com/stagecraft/ [2] https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1225599-the-volum... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft

Technology is often used as an excuse for poor business decisions, but it is not always the sole cause of a company's troubles. In the case of Disney, the company's success is largely based on its ability to create and produce compelling movies and characters.

Since they stop doing so, Disney is in trouble.

The old CEO forgot that and focused on operational part of the company (parks, streamline online delivery) and completly ignored talents.

It is important for companies to adapt to technological changes, but they should not lose sight of their core strengths and what has made them successful in the first place.

>In the case of Disney, the company's success is largely based on its ability to create and produce compelling movies and characters.

> Since they stop doing so, Disney is in trouble.

Weird live action remakes and recycled franchises are lazy. I'm still hoping disney will rediscover traditional animation and give us more original content.

https://archive.ph/EOv9l

-- Disney research hub - still one of my fav youtube channels --

https://www.youtube.com/@DisneyResearchHub/videos

"A series based on “The Last of Us”, a post-apocalyptic game, seems to be a critical success. Sonic the Hedgehog was among last year’s biggest films and Mario is likely to be among this year’s. Nintendo is opening a new Mario theme park next month—in Hollywood, no less."

For a second, I just imagined how bad would be the Disney version of Mario or Rocky Balboa. Disney is one company that probably few of us were going to miss if they go broke... unfortunately.

> "A series based on “The Last of Us”, a post-apocalyptic game, seems to be a critical success.

It was announced to be, long before it was released. It's very very bad. In the future, no one uses a broom or cleans up their room.

You think the TLOU TV adaptation is bad because a zombie apocalypse is cluttered?

> Disney is one company that probably few of us were going to miss if they go broke

What on Earth are you talking about? Disney is one of the beloved companies in the entire world. Tens of millions of people would be crushed if Disney would go broke. Provide some real facts instead of making baseless opinionated claims.

Tens of millions vs population of even just the US let alone the entire planet == few of us.

well, you could maybe provide us some facts about "Tens of millions of people would be crushed"? Based on their numbers, looks like less people are wanting to watch Disney content or visit Disney park.. Otherwise they wouldn't be in trouble at all.

if disney went broke someone else would buy them and life woukd continue almost without a difference.

I don’t know what people are complaining about. The amount of quality entertainment available today is breathtaking. From Breaking Bad to The Wire to excellent series from France, Denmark etc. the choices are amazing! Just don’t watch the super hero crap (except The Boys of course!)

Technology is not the issue for Disney, its that they have alienated half of their audience with their current ideology.

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