Comment by bexsella | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bexsella | Hacker News Reader

A24, I think, hit upon something that had been nagging at me for years in that Hollywood films are massive productions, several million dollars get poured into them. Not every film is a Marvel $250 million undertaking, but the recent Puss in Boots sequel costs about $90+ million, Dungeons and Dragons cost $150 million, heck even Halloween Ends cost $33 million (add a grain of salt for each of these figures). What's missing? $1 million, $5 million, $10 million.

This space between low budget and medium budget was, for a little while, nearly non-existent. With these budgets, you don't have to be that successful to get your investment in the black. It allows you to make riskier films, and there is clearly a market for films of depth and creativity. It boggles the mind that Halloween Ends required more budget (I assume it's mostly marketing) than Everything Everywhere All at Once, it's just about a guy killing people, in fairness one of those people was Jamie Lee Curtis.

Martin Scorsese and others have complained about this, but tend to get shouted down by Marvel enthusiasts, but yes: the mid-range films from studios have largely evaporated; as they run more like any other business, the focus is entirely on ROI and not at all on art, whereas studios (for most of their history) tended to balance out ruthless financials around their money-makers with a desire to set aside some of the profit for low-return, mid-budget works that skew more to the art side of things.

I went to see many small to mid sized films in the 1990s - 2000s, and heres the thing: it was often just 3 or 4 other people in the cinema. Seems like a misallocation of resources. The old system wasn't perfect either.

Nowadays the energy, ingenuity and talent that would have gone into making smaller films is instead going into making premium TV. I can see why cinema purists are upset by the shift to streaming, but as an audience member I'm currently getting an unlimited buffet of content on 3 streaming services paying about what I would have paid back in the day to see 3 movies.

Are you not entertained?

> Nowadays the energy, ingenuity and talent that would have gone into making smaller films is instead going into making premium TV.

I hate this. I think 80-110 minutes is a good amount of time to tell a story. It's enough time to develop characters and build a world, but it's short enough that to be effective a film has to be ruthlessly edited.

Stories for TV are so bloated. Series like Stranger Things, Servant, The Last of Us and Russian Doll would have been perfectly suited to the movie format, but instead they get padded out to 8-hour seasons.

I should note I don't think this is true of all series, by any means. Lots of stories are well suited to the series format, like Succession, Dahmer or The Boys. And I know my opinion won't be a popular one because the runaway success of long bloated stories shows us which way the winds are blowing.

I have a similar opinion about series. They tend to become either repetitive or implausible over time, and they rarely have a decent ending. Too much time to fill and too little ability to plan ahead to avoid these.

The theatrical releases were probably a waste but these movies made their money on vhs and dvd sales. However, direct to dvd was considered a bargain bin only movie without prestige and theater appearances were and are required for Oscar contention so even then theater releases did make some economic sense.

On paper, a lot of these movies should have moved to direct to streaming but haven’t for whatever reason.

Yeah it's surprising how shallow the back catalogues of all the streaming services are. Currently they don't seem to be incentivised to acquire the rights to older content, because the flashy new stuff is what reels in the flashy new customers.

Would there be demand for a streaming service to host older quality content under a new umbrella, or maybe just a retro focused offshoot of an existing streaming service? Kind of like one of those old timey video stores that specialised in rare cult classics.

Martin's Scorsese's last film, The Irishman, cost over $175 million (not including marketing)...which actually puts it over the budget of most Marvel movies.

At least he put it into use considering it has a runtime of 3 hours and 29 minutes. Marvel only gives you about two hours for $175 million!

>the focus is entirely on ROI and not at all on art

A relation of mine went to England's best known acting school. Graduated and went to LA to start her career. Quit within two years saying, "I always thought it was about the art. It's not."

Even better, Jamie Lee Curtis was in both of those movies.

Blumhouse is the only big name actively doing 5-10 million movies.

Their trick is that they give a percentage to the actors and director and just a flat basic fee. Even "big" stars like Jennifer Lopez didn't get a million up front - she actually even used her own clothes for her Blumhouse horror movie.

They make a few flops, but their hits offset those easily. Paranormal Activity (their first one I think?) had a budget of $15k and made over $190 million in the box office.

$10 million hasn't been "medium" budget for Hollywood since the 1990s. In 1995, the average cost of a Hollywood film was approximately $34million. By 2003, that number had ballooned to $59 million. (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-03-08-fi-40252-...)

Today, the threshold for "medium budget" is somewhere around $30 million, with the threshold for "high budget" somewhere around $90-100 million.

Also, A24 is as Hollywood as you can get. Their offices are located in WeHo. All of their films are the kinds of films that Fox Searchlight and New Line Cinema specialized in.

(With respect to the films you mentioned, Puss in Boots and Halloween Ends both achieved profitability during their theatrical runs. D&DHAT did not make its budget back in theaters and is not expected to achieve profitability for several years if ever; it is very likely that it will not get a sequel, or if it does the sequel will have a much smaller budget.)

Yes this is the exact point he is trying to make.

No, his point was that A24 is not doing the "typical" Hollywood thing, by focusing on low-to-mid budget films.

My point was that A24 (which is based in Hollywood) is just doing what New Line Cinema and Fox Searchlight (also based in Hollywood) did before them. New Line has since graduated to mid-to-high budget films due to the success of their early films like Scream. Searchlight still distributes arthouse films but under Disney has a significantly smaller budget to produce or acquire films; it's arguably more indie than A24 is now.

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