Barry Diller: The Oscars Are over and the Movie Business Is Finished
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Throughout the 60s and 70s 19/20 films that won best picture were in the Top 10 Grossing. Since 2003 there hasn’t been a single one. Even after they expanded the number of nominations there’s still only 0-1 nominations in the Top 10 Grossing every year.
This is really due to the the fact that nearly every film in the Top 10 Grossing is a sequel, a remake, or a franchise movie. These films print money so Hollywood keeps making them.
In 1979 Kramer v Kramer was the highest grossing film. In 2021 it was Spider-Man: No Way Home (the 12th Spider-Man film to come out since 2000). Spider-Man made over 3 times as much when adjusted for inflation.
You could say that the artistic portion of Hollywood is dying, though Hollywood is doing as good as always.
I had just watched the series The Serpent last week and that was as brilliant as any movie I can think of that I have ever watched.
To cut it down to a 90 minute movie would have just made it a rehash and most likely not very interesting.
One thing I really like about these serial TV shows (like Game of Thrones) is that they're limited to 1-hour episodes. So I don't have to dedicate 3 hours or more of my time to a single viewing; it's a lot easier to fit 1 hour into an evening. And then I can see more of the story in following evenings. I also don't have to sit in a theater holding my bladder for 3 hours, since TV shows are seen at home, and I can pause it if I don't want to wait until the end for a bathroom break.
Awards, as a marketing tool, are still worth playing and winning for the producer of a film if not mainly for the purpose of selling their title to a VOD library. And while the effect for the VOD distribution might not be 1:1, it is worth having that sort of content in your offering.
Academy Awards are a strange beauty pageant - the campaigning that must happen and the way a title must be made to win is too strange. It’s kind of like food - aiming to be a fast casual franchise is different from wanting to start a michelin restaurant.
When you word it like that, you make it sound like "the masses" don't find movies artistically valuable, and "the elites" don't find movies entertaining.
What if "the masses" are able to find movies just as artistically valuable as "the elites", but just don't want to shell out $100 going to see a movie that can be viewed at home in a few months for free without any loss of fidelity? And what if "the elites" take just as much pleasure as "the masses" in seeing the newest Hollywood spectacle in 3D IMAX with 100+ channels of Atmos surround sound?
In other words, what if this doesn't have anything to do with social class, but rather with the fact that going to the theater costs 10x as much as it used to cost while home viewing is 10x better than it used to be?
I'm not saying the increased theater cost isn't worth it. To the contrary: some movies can really only be properly experienced in the theaters with all the bells and whistles—and those movies are the ones that people are willing to pay for.
Haven’t been to the theater in over a decade, does it really now cost that much to see a movie with hundreds of other people farting, chewing on popcorn, slurping their drinks, in maybe a good seat (maybe not), on a fixed rigid schedule?
If so, no wonder cinemas are dying… I’d do anything to avoid this “experience” especially if it costs so much.
Instead I can watch it at home on my decent sound system without 20 minutes of ads before the movie, no risk of Covid or flu, on my OLED screen, pausing whenever I need, with the volume I like, and subtitles if I feel like it.
> does it really now cost that much to see a movie
No. Even with "premium" stuff like 3D and IMAX, it's still only like $20.
Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, I just h wars that theater is closing.
I only saw a movie solo once, as I never got the appeal of the movie theater and only ever got dragged there by dates and friends.
My kids never cared for it, so the bullet was largely dodged.
All that said, using the word "only" as you did indicates a certain level of economic ignorance.
I wasn't using "only" to say it's cheap from some absolute perspective, just that it's way cheaper than was claimed. For example, if someone says an Airbus A320 costs about $500,000,000, it's not economically ignorant to respond that no, it "only" costs about $100,000,000.
People who want to get into the "theoretical" aspects of a movie can go insanely deep very quickly, whereas the average person won't care as much. On one hand you have a bunch of nerds trying to make/recognize increasingly obscure references as our ability to remember and find things gets better, and on the other hand you have people who just want to see stuff get blown up.
How much bigger is the market of buyers? I assume much bigger than 3 times if people in China/India/etc were not watching American movies in 1979.
Ultimately, they're a sampling of Hollywood insiders' opinions of which films were the most "Oscar" of the previous year's pick of Hollywood films, publicized to promote those films, the general idea that Hollywood is still relevant in the film industry, and the even more nebulous idea that what Hollywood defines as films are relevant in our culture.
It isn't even about the "Best" in any real sense: "Best" is either subjective, in which case Hollywood's idea is as good as anyone's, or is defined through long-lasting cultural impact, in which case nobody can pick out the "Best" films of a year a few months after that year is over.
Is it even guaranteed that the year's best, longest-lasting films will even be made in the Hollywood system? Will they be the ones eligible for Oscars? Hollywood wants people to think so, which is part of what the Oscars are for, to legitimize the Hollywood process and culture, but the world is bigger than that now. We've grown up.
So why does Avengers make $2B per movie - mostly overseas - if it's irrelevant? Why are more people watching Hollywood movies (and spending more money to do so) than ever before if Hollywood is irrelevant?
Just because you have different tastes than Hollywood doesn't mean Hollywood is in decline. Maybe you think the quality is. That's subjective. Someone's always going to think that.
But it's hard to argue the relevance is... Objectively, it just doesn't seem to be the case.
Are the numbers fake?
How do you define "relevant" other than people watching content in an industry defined by... people watching content?!
Because everyone forgets to adjust for inflation.
The alternative is that the Oscars keeps trying to build a big tent (like when they expanded best picture to 10 movies so they could throw a few gimmes in there to mass audiences) and IMO that's doomed to failure. The MTV Movie Awards already exists and does its thing for big blockbusters, the world doesn't need another.
All this said I am going to be interested to see where cinema is in 5-10 years. My personal theory is that once superhero movies face an audience decline (which, to some level, is inevitable) they'll end up in a difficult spot: their budgets are astronomical and will have to be trimmed back, which will result in less impressive movies, which could lead to a downward spiral. Maybe at that point we'll see a revival of mid-budget mass movies. ...but probably not.
do you think the release of one superhero movie per quarter keeps the whole mid-budget movie industry in deadlock?
could you give a few examples of what you consider good mid-budget movies that would have been affected the current situation?
This in sense large number of people have only so much time. With Superhero stuff dropping in with high frequency and kids forcing families to watch them, other mass movies do not stand much chance to find audience time.
In terms of the kind of movies I'm thinking of, looking back through past best picture winners I'm thinking of things like A Beautiful Mind, No Country for Old Men, American Beauty. But also "frat pack" type comedies like Knocked Up, Dodgeball etc etc, they were their own mini industry for a time!
Obviously it's difficult to say which of those would be affected today (effectively asking which movies do we not know about that haven't been made today) but the mid-budget decline is a well documented thing.
Or rather, I do know. It's because people used to like watching movie stars glam themselves up and be generally famous and fabulous at each other. There are so many better entertainment options now.
The Oscars have usually done a decent job of promoting something with some kind of artistic merit but not a ton of attention. Not always, but every year there are usually a few films that deserved more than they got. If you were looking for something a bit different from the usual fare, there are worse places to look than the Oscars' list.
It'll be slightly sad if that flounders because there's no longer an appetite for watching famous, beautiful people be beautiful and famous. But it doesn't affect the industry one way or the other.
I actually kinda hope that the voracious appetite of competing streaming services means more filmmakers get a chance to be seen. If that means the death of Hollywood-as-we-know it, the machine for producing a tiny number of very famous people... oh well.
“I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it,” he told NPR. The very definition of movie, he went on, “is in such transition that it doesn’t mean anything right now.”
But young people these days dont ...
Sure, "Raiders" was unabashed about that. It was reviving the style of serials that were constructed in the same manner. And I think there's a place for those films. Sadly that seemed to become the template for The Blockbuster Film ever since.
Then "Pirates of the Caribbean" and their whole franchise took that storyboard model to the point where it became almost a parody. There were so many "climatic battles" in those films that I never had any clue as to when the film was actually about to end. (And we seemed to go past two hours for action films on a regular basis by then as well.)
When all the super-hero films started crowding the release schedules they were so bad I stopped going to the theater altogether. :-(
They did not die as heroes, therefore lasted long enough to become villains.
Hollywood never really "cared" about anything but high stacks of denominated currency.
There surely is! This scene is so over the top, it is clearly not meant to be taken literally. Some people even interpret it as a hallucination by Travis while he is dying.
Casino's main character is Jewish. Gangs of New York is about Irish Catholics and American Protestants. The Departed is about Irishes. The Wolf of Wall Street may be about depression (haven't seen it), but is not about violence nor about Italians. The Irishman certainly has a lot of depression, and certainly violence and Italians, but even then.....it's called the "Irishman".
Goodfellas is probably the one prime example that is certainly about violence and Italians, and I'm not sure that's that depressed.
It arguably already is, always has been, and that's why it's in decline. The demographics of the Academy put the voting members out of touch with the public in a way that makes the award winners a big list of head-scratchers. I was shook when Everything Everywhere All at Once got a bunch of nominations though, maybe there's hope for this thing.
No one watches the Grammies anymore (for some value of "no one"). But people are still listening to music, and money continues to be made. There is still a music industry, albeit increasingly dominated by older artists and material. People still go to concerts (hello, Taylor Swift).
The Oscars have no real purpose anymore, either, but people still consume video content; just on their home screens. The big "movie and TV" companies will continue to churn out crap to fill the void, and consumers will still search for some opinions they respect as to the content worth watching. People in the industry will still seek validation that they're something more than disposable units like K-Pop "stars."
Next evolution: awards shows move to subscription channels, so people in the industry and anyone who really wants to can watch them. Like most baseball games.
We called them up not too long ago to ask about booking a party. Nope, they said that they didn't expect to have anything kid-appropriate available to them during our requested weekend (next month).
I'm surprised the theatre couldn't just put on an older movie but maybe the deal with their distributor forbids them from doing so?
We have a small movie theater in Linz, Austria, where they do do put up older movies, just a few months ago I was the only of two dressed as expected for Reservoir Dogs. And then they skip movies altogether and I have to the big one outside the city center. I wish they'd digitalize the movie-wishlist so I could enjoy older movies with friends that we actually want to see.
I've been thinking about that too. I've really wanted to get the kids out of the house lately, but there was nothing new to watch in the cinema. I wouldn't mind taking them to see an old film.
People have had this system at home for 15+ years. The question is does watching it in a movie theater provide sufficient utility for the cost compared to watching it at home.
The movie producers and distributors are very much at fault for this set up.
It would be super great to be able to run a kids/family movie on Fri + Sat Morning then do a more adult movie on Sat night/ Sunday, but it just isn't allowed.
The people killing movies in a theater is the movie companies, not the theaters.
Comparing box office [0] is hard due to COVID and there’s still money to be made. But it’s not the same.
I think we’ll find that the box office peaked a few years ago.
People still buy records and CDs so there will always likely some theaters. Just not like it was.
I would love to see it become a golden era of the niche matinee where smaller theaters can flourish that show older films, art films, foreign films etc.
I would love to see distributors offer up high-quality digital copies of their films for small theaters to screen. Might be another source of cash flow to the rights-holders. It would be nice to see, just as an example, "Andrei Rublyov", on the big screen in 8K or whatever quality.
While I lament the number of bookstores and music shops that have gone away, and that boom times are unlikely to come again (and birth wide variety) … what remains are generally purposeful, well-cared-for, well-appreciated places.
It's not what I'd wish, but it's where I hope things go for the theatrical experience as well.
You should love the reality we live in, then, because that's exactly what's been happening and it's in some sense part of the problem.
My spouse and I go to the theaters as often as we ever have, but it's very noticeable that the lion's share of the movies we now watch in theater are special showings of older movie classics or "cinema of country X" type festival events, which than often select from the last ten years or so. This has held for the past half-decade across two countries.
When we lived in Seoul, there was a few years when it was a popular couple date option to go to open air rooftop cinemas showing modern classics like "Her" or "Before Sunrise", or to go to the Silver Cinemas originally subsidized for seniors where you'd watch old Hollywood classics from the 40s to 60s (we managed to watch a 70mm projection of all the 4 hours of "Lawrence of Arabia" that way). Now in Berlin, there's a large selection of small cinemas showing random movies from all eras. Our favorite is situated in an old DVD store and specializes in a combo of movies and serving specialty whisky ... it's as hipster as it sounds. I think the last movies we went to see there were "First Blood" and "Persona" and "Leon", I guess.
And it's fun, but at the same time it's kind of sad your only two options are watching the latest Marvel flick or All Time Top 250 movies from the 1970s. That still means so much that movies used to be is gone. The second-tier smaller blockbusters you had in the 80s and 90s for example, non-franchise original IP, or the even the lesser known movies from decades past. If you're not on top of the food order, you're just gone.
I'm not too doom-y and gloom-y overall on the state of movies, there's still more interesting movies each year than I can keep up with if I aggregate all the possible venues. But the selection in cinemas is, well, very two-note.
I isolate because it's the safest way to live in terms of avoiding Covid.
It works just fine for me: everything I need can be ordered/delivered to my front door/mailbox.
I live alone (with my cat so, far from alone... but I digress) and am not immunocompromised or otherwise ill.
In fact, the opposite is true: I won the Richmond Half-Marathon in 2018 in a time of 1:55 [sub-9-minutes/mile] (Men 70-75); finished 3rd in 2019 in 1:57; and am determined to win this year's race (Men 75-80; I turn 75 on June 8 and the race is on November 11, 2023).
People I know keep getting Covid; some 525 people/day in the U.S. die of Covid; long Covid basically destroys lives and is doing so to millions of Americans.
It's as if by declaring an emergency over, by some magical spell it becomes true to many; not to me.
I already know EXACTLY how long I will continue to live this way and have told this to my family (daughter/son-in-law/6-year-old grandson who live in Pittsburgh, whom I last saw in person in November 2019).
When the U.S. death rate from Covid equals that from car crashes (45,000 in 2022; 120 people/day), that is when I will toss my 3M N95 masks in the trash and live like everyone else.
What with the current figure of 525 deaths/day — up from around 300, the lowest it's ever been, in October 2022, since when it's risen steadily — I project around 2027-2030.
I'm glad to see you are still active despite being isolated.
You are obviously a smart person and likely more familiar with the medical aspects of this than me due to your background. Do you feel at all that you are staying this path due to the initial justified fear of the disease and now it's simply a part of your mindset or do you think you are able to frequently reassess your isolation from a new unbiased point of view? Again this is not an attack, you are obviously making many sacrifices to live this way and sometimes it's hard to take a step back and see the whole picture. Pros vs cons.
Were you an introvert before (as that may have eased the transition)?
What are your thoughts on those that no longer isolate, especially people with kids?
Feel free to ignore some or all of my questions:)
Again, no judgement, just interested in the mindset and perspective of those that have made this decision.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2021-2022.htm
If I use that metric I'm never ever gonna feel safe from Covid! Best I stick to car crashes, no?
No, I don't think for a second I'd continue my lifestyle unless the evidence justified it.
I'm always looking for evidence making it safe to abandon my extreme approach but so far I haven't found it.
The thing is, I don't feel like I'm making any sacrifices to live how I'm living — with the exception of not seeing my family in person (FaceTime isn't a substitute).
You called it: I'm basically an introvert, happiest sitting quietly with my cat on my lap reading.
This has always been the case my entire life, for many decades before Covid.
I'm totally fine with others who don't isolate, whether or not they have kids.
I find no fault with anyone's approach/behavior, but I must say every time I see a picture of an crowded airport, as happened with the Southwest Airlines debacle, I marvel at the way almost all people don't give any thought to Covid.
All the best and I hope we hit your metric sooner than later. Good luck at your race!
Box office numbers for blockbusters still shows plenty of people like going to the movies. You just don't hear about much outside of the blockbusters anymore.
Comedy and romantic comedy seems to have largely died out for some reason.
Used to be that if you wanted to see a new movie you had to see it in theaters. Now you have a lot more options, so going to the theater is more of a planned, special event.
I think the analogy to music fits. Before recorded music there were tons of music venues because if you wanted to hear music (and not your own), you had to get out of the house. Live concerts and performances most definitely didn't die, but they became more of a special-event type of thing.
recorded music has been around for many many decades, predating everyone alive.
I also love paper comic books, but they are basically dead as far as a popular art form in and of themselves.
I think the word you are looking for is dying. Dead vs dying is not the same thing. Dead is dead, unless it's a zombie. Dying a slow death is what you're describing, but miracles can happen that prevent the actual death.
Also, peaking doesn't mean dead. I'm just really confused by your definitions
I think they might want our brains, actually.
So sort of like in the fashion sense. I mean bellbottoms still exist, but they are rare .
Or similar to the expression “jump the shark” in that it is still popular, but less so over time. And its inevitable demise is known so it speeds up its demise.
And yeah, the self-congratulatory nonsense that is the Oscars is out of touch with audiences, but there are lots of studios that are doing great things--they're just not trying for Oscars, so they're not winning them.
I think theaters can be fairly cheap to run and my city already has a few “hobby” theaters that don’t make money but are kept open by someone who really likes movies.
I want to go to the cinema, I want to take my kids, but there's nothing on!
Personally I don't think they'd be improved by adding sex, maybe improved by some better innuendo. I think movies in general WAY overuse sex scenes where its totally unnecessary or where some innuendo (or even just people heading to the bedroom) would suffice for plot purposes. It's not like movies usually acknowledge that people ever go to the bathroom, but you know if movie plots were real life half of them would have been tripped up because someone was in the toilet at the wrong time.
But when it comes to the marvel movies, I'm really at a loss at what adult content you think is making them unsuitable other than their fundamental violence.
Pretty rich stuff coming from a dude who presides over a studio that's basically pumped out nothing but reboots, sequels and schlock for the last decade.
He must really care about the cinematic masterpieces (/S) that are the Mission Impossible and Transformers franchises since they keep making so damn many of them even after most of us long ago stopped caring.
He's not wrong about the movie business in general though, he's just right for the wrong reasons.
Whatever is left of the film and TV industries in 10 years after AI has disrupted literally every facet of content production, is going to be wildly different and likely unrecognizable to the industry of today. Legacy incumbents like Paramount might have an advantage in that they'll have the capital to invest in the new tools and be able to re-capture a sizable portion of the market, but more likely they'll have too much momentum and inertia to adjust to the changing times quickly enough, and will be left in the dust by new more "AI focused" studios who are able to pump out A LOT more content for a great range of niche audiences A LOT more quickly, and who are better able to figure out distribution to allow them to monetize they're content more effectively in a post scarcity media industry.
Which studio? I thought Diller was mostly into matchmaking / travel agent / other websites.
Better or worse, I don't care, but it was a lot different. I could see people caring about the Oscars more in the past because there was a commitment beyond the couch. You couldn't normally see an Oscar nominated movie unless you got to a theatre. I can see the Oscars becoming a footnote pretty soon.
I've been listening to The Video Archives podcast and really enjoy the analysis and movie lore. It will be interesting to see how this present generation of movies gets analyzed and the stories they generate.
Just attended a few screenings at the Sundance Film Festival. All of them full of people happy to lay out money and effort to show up to a theater.
All of the films I saw were worth watching. Maybe one of them will be a box office hit ("Polite Society" smells like that particularly).
Probably none of them will be films everyone watches. Not every film needs to be.
Why I possibly want to watch a parade of spoiled famous people run to a podium to preach their uniform political opinions to viewers?
I still go to the theaters pretty often. The subscription style pass at Regal is pretty useful.
So they're thinking of taking the E3 route. Bold move, let's see how it plays out.
There's no real exclusivity to a cinema, because home video is too compelling. Even if it says "only in theatres" on the ad, you're still doing mental math of "okay, so that's N weeks till it hits $streaming_service".
They can counter this by bringing back something like the old Boomer "in my day, we got a serial and a cartoon and the feature!" angle.
Put together some 10-minute shorts. Make it clear they're never coming to home video (or on a massive delay-- like if you do a serial, release a packaged version 5 years after the last installment). If you can make them a serial or recurring characters so people get vested in regular installments, all the better. Animation might be a good choice, because you can slip it in front of anything all the way down to G-rated kiddie films. Suddenly, there's something you can only get at the cinema that's not a $9 box of Goobers.
Yes, in short, I'm saying to bring back the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. The main film still goes to streaming and DVDs eventually, but now viewers are also saying "I did want to see the new Wile E. Coyote bit, so I may as well move up my plans to see Superhero Colonoscopy VII to this weekend."
Want to watch cartoons? Great! Disney plus is actually quite cheap. Streaming is much cheaper and far more convinient than going to the movies, and if you have kids you either have to pay for tickets and snacks for everybody, or you have to get somebody to look after them.
Adding a single exclusive cartoon is not going to change that.
Studios don't have to be dumb for a more optimal solution for { attention, culture, interest, sharing, signalling, popularity, fame, value, narrative, etc. } to arise.
Studios being dumb did contribute, but I think that played a more subdued role. The dominating factor is that new mediums solve the core reason for Hollywood's existence better.
then how does culture evolve? isn’t because the it emerges from newer generations?
The power of the Paul brothers et al is incredible.
My nephews are spoiled and got lots of stuff for Xmas including a PS5. What they were most excited about was me bringing back ‘American Prime’ for them.
Sending pics of the bottles to their mates, they sold the empty bottles for 10 quid each at school.
Kids would buy them to put water in and pretend they were drinking Prime.
Adults texting each other rumors of stock online.
[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all...
And both of 2022's winners were sequels (2009 and 1986), suggesting that this is milking the last and the new generation of creators aren't bringing in comparable audiences.
Who is the new Lucas, Spielberg, Cameron, Nolan?
And where is the midmarket depth? (Streaming)
https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/domestic/all-...
Anecdotally, and intuitively, I think it is exactly like that? After sitting inside watching TV for two years, people were absolutely missing in-person, out-of-the-house experiences like the cinema. And they were sitting on two years of savings so the popcorn prices were easier to stomach.
His statement about the decline of the film industry and the "perfect storm" created by increasing ticket prices, the pandemic, and the surge of streaming platforms is a weak and oversimplified excuse for the decline of the movie industry. He's blaming the decline of the movie industry on factors that are beyond anyone's control and not taking responsibility for the lack of innovation and creativity within the industry itself.
Diller's comments about the film industry being in transition and not meaning anything right now are completely inaccurate. The film industry is alive and well and continues to evolve, as evidenced by the success of streaming platforms and the continued production of highly anticipated movies.
Furthermore, his statement that the Oscars should aim for a smaller, less discerning audience is unacceptable. The Oscars should continue to strive for a large and diverse audience that reflects the film industry as a whole. It should not be for the industry only and exclude the consumers who drive its success.
How dare you dismiss his dismissal? I suspect both you and Diller have skin in the game, but I'm guessing Diller has more data to back up his prognistications.